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COFVRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



LEARNING TO WRITE 



LEARNING TO WRITE 

SUGGESTIONS AND COUNSEL FROM 

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 



That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write; 
whether I have profited or not, that is the way. 
A College Magazine, in 
"Memories and Portraits." 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1920 






Copyright, 1888, 1920, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



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CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. How Stevenson Taught Himself to 
Write from "A College Maga- 
zine" . . .. i 

II. Letter to a Young Gentleman Who 
Proposes to Embrace the Ca- 
reer of Art 7 

III. A Note on Realism 21 

IV. Books Which Have Influenced Me 32 

V. A Gossip on Romance 44 

VI. The Craft in Telling a Story, from 

"A Humble Remonstrance " . . . 66 

VII. Miscellaneous Observations: 

notes for the student of any art 78 

craftsmanship in literature 79 

importance of style in writing . 82 

danger of realism 83 

difficulty for beginners 83 

writing without effort 84 

subjects for poems 87 

Stevenson's method of writing. . 87 

holding the reader's attention . 88 

WORDS 88 

EFFECTIVENESS OF PROFUSE DESCRIP- 
TION 90 

V 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

USE OF RECOLLECTIONS IN WRITING 91 
BUILDING A CHARACTER FOR A STORY 94 
HOW WE UNDERSTAND OTHER PEO- 
PLE 95 

WRITING CHARACTER STUDIES 96 

A TRICK OF HEROINES IOO 

DIFFICULTY AND ADVANTAGE OF COL- 
LABORATION IOI 

THE IMPORTANCE OF NARRATIVE IN 

LITERATURE 102 

SUBJECT FOR LITERATURE 103 

SPIRIT IN LITERATURE IO3 

WHAT, INTERESTS US IN ROBINSON 

CRUSOE IO4 

BOOKS WE RE-READ I04 

WHEN THE IMAGINATION GROWS 

STALE 105 

AN ANALYSIS OF THE FABLE FORM. I07 
THE GENESIS OF "THE MASTER OF 

BALLANTRAE " IIO 

HOW THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 
FREED THE IMAGINATION IN WRIT- 
ING 115 

VIII. The Morality of the Profession 

of Letters 120 

EX. Popular Authors 138 

X. Some Gentlemen in Fiction 159 

XI. A Chapter on Dreams 176 

XII. On Some Technical Elements of 

Style in Literature 197 



INTRODUCTION 

How Stevenson would have developed his 
proposed book, The Art of Literature^ we may 
only guess, for the project never found tangible 
form further than the "loose ends" in scattered 
essays and random observations spontaneously 
put into his pages by way of apt illustration or 
to clinch the point in a criticism. Yet, in those 
unjointed observations, the spirit of the book 
was truly born and — as the brief character of 
Julius Caesar dominates Shakespeare's play — 
its personality pervades and colors all of Steven- 
son's works. 

He himself points out in his paper, "Fon- 
tainebleau," that while he was learning to write 
he spent much of his time in Barbizon in the 
company of painters. Surrounded by this at- 
mosphere in which art was made by the labor 
of the hands, and was obviously blundered or 
created according to their skill in the principles 
of technic — the necessity of a technic in all art 
was made vividly clear to him. 

"To find for all he had to say words of vital 
aptness and animation — to communicate as 
much as possible of what he has somewhere 
called 'the incommunicable thrill of things' — 
was from the first his endeavor — nay more, it 
was the main passion of his life," says his great 
friend Sidney Colvin. It is not unnatural, then, 

vii 



viii INTRODUCTION 

that he determined to achieve a technic in 
writing and that his interest in the craft of 
literature — the means of commanding expres- 
sion — should have moved him deeply. 

No writer ever took more pains to learn how 
to write, and it is significant that no author in 
modern times has been so successful in so many 
forms of literature. It is significant, too, for his 
theories of craftsmanship that he has gained the 
interest of an astonishingly wide and varied 
audience, and that along with the perfection in 
form and style which gives pleasure chiefly to 
the fastidious, he appeals (speaking from Col- 
vin again) " rather to the universal, hereditary 
instincts, to the primitive sources of imaginative 
excitement in the race." 

Of course, this tremendous practical success 
of his books is what has kept his prescribed 
canons of learning how to write before the 
world — and to-day they have been so much 
heralded that people who have not read half a 
dozen pages in his books know something about 
them. Yet, in spite of the constant reference to 
them — in spite of discussion prolonged from 
year to year — there has never before been a 
systematic attempt to gather together and ar- 
range in one volume all he has left directly on 
the art of writing; — that is what this book has 
tried to do. How significant such a collection 
will be remains to be proved; at least, to any 
one seriously concerned with the business of 
learning to write, it will be interesting to ex- 
amine, and the reader cannot turn away from 
it except refreshed with the splendid saneness. 



INTRODUCTION ix 

But he who comes seeking a macadamized, 
mile-posted road to the secret of writing, or a 
set of classroom rules to be duly worked out 
with an academic niceness will be disappointed. 
For definite as is the trade of writing, it is the 
united cry of all good craftsmen in the profes- 
sion of letters that for each man literature is an 
uncharted sea and that the waves wash away 
the track of every vessel that has gone before. 
Yet, here is the log of one such vessel which 
made her port with colors flying, and for those 
who have a genuine taste for the sea — an in- 
stinct for its language and hardships — there is 
much to be learned which will help them on their 
adventures. 

In arranging the contents of this book, it has 
been the plan to try to group them so the reader 
may learn something of Stevenson's theory of 
the craft of writing before he is led into a dis- 
cussion of the intricate technical details. In 
some cases, for instance in the passages from A 
Humble Remonstrance, the editor has omitted 
certain parts which if included in the present 
scheme would uselessly tend to confuse the 
reader. 

John William Rogers, Jr. 



The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to 
write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but 
to affect him precisely as you wish. This is com- 
monly understood in the case of books or set orations; 
even in making your will, or writing an explicit letter, 
some difficulty is admitted by the world. But one 
thing you can never make Philistine natures under- 
stand; one thing, which yet lies on the surface, re- 
mains as unseizable to their wits as a high flight of 
metaphysics — namely, that the business of life is 
mainly carried on by means of this difficult art of litera- 
ture, and according to a man's proficiency in that art 
shall be the freedom and the fulness of his intercourse 
with other men. 

— The Truth of Intercourse. 



HOW STEVENSON TAUGHT HIMSELF 
TO WRITE 

From "A College Magazine" 

> All through my boyhood and youth, I was 
known and pointed out for the pattern of an 
idler; and yet I was always busy on my own 
private end, which was to learn to write* I 
kept always two books in my pocket, one to 
read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind 
was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate 
words; when I sat by the roadside, I would 
either read, or a pencil and a penny version- 
book would be in my hand, to note down the 
features of the scene or commemorate some 
halting stanzas. Thus I lived with words. 
And what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use, 
it was written consciously for practice. It was 
not so much that I wished to be an author 
(though I wished that too) as that I had vowed 
that I would learn to write. That was a pro- 
ficiency that tempted me; and I practised to 
acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager 
with myself. Description was the principal 



2 LEARNING TO WRITE 

field of my exercise; for to any one with senses 
there is always something worth describing, 
and town and country are but one continuous 
subject. But I worked in other ways also; often 
accompanied my walks with dramatic dia- 
logues, in which I played many parts; and often 
exercised myself in writing down conversations 
from memory. 

This was all excellent, no doubt; so were the 
diaries I sometimes tried to keep, but always 
and very speedily discarded, finding them a 
school of posturing and melancholy self-decep- 
tion. And yet this was not the most efficient 
part of my training. Good though it was, it 
only taught me (so far as I have learned them 
at all) the lower and less intellectual elements 
of the art, the choice of the essential note and 
the right word: things that to a happier con- 
stitution had perhaps come by nature. And 
regarded as training, it had one grave defect; 
for it set me no standard of achievement. So 
that there was perhaps more profit, as there 
was certainly more effort, in my secret labours 
at home. Whenever I read a book or a passage 
that particularly pleased me, in which a thing 
was said or an effect rendered with propriety, 
in which there was either some conspicuous 
force or some happy distinction in the style, I 
must sit down at once and set myself to ape 



STEVENSON TAUGHT HIMSELF 3 

that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew 
it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful 
and always unsuccessful; but at least in these 
vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in 
harmony, in construction and the co-ordination 
of parts. I have thus played the sedulous ape 
to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir 
Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to 
Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann. 
I remember one of these monkey tricks, which 
was called The Vanity of Morals: it was to have 
had a second part, The Vanity of Knowledge; 
and as I had neither morality nor scholarship, 
the names were apt; but the second part was 
never attempted, and the first part was written 
(which is my reason for recalling it, ghostlike, 
from its ashes) no less than three times: first in 
the manner of Hazlitt, second in the manner of 
Ruskin, who had cast on me a passing spell, 
and third, in a laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas 
Browne. So with my other works: Cain, an 
epic, was (save the mark !) an imitation of Sor- 
dello: Robin Hood, a tale in verse, took an 
eclectic middle course among the fields of Keats, 
Chaucer and Morris: in Monmouth, a tragedy, I 
reclined on the bosom of Mr. Swinburne; in my 
innumerable gouty-footed lyrics, I followed 
many masters; in the first draft of The King's 
Pardon, a tragedy, I was on the trail of no 



4 LEARNING TO WRITE 

lesser man than John Webster; in the second 
draft of the same piece, with staggering versa- 
tility, I had shifted my allegiance to Congreve, 
and of course conceived my fable in a less seri- 
ous vein — for it was not Congreve's verse, it 
was his exquisite prose, that I admired and 
sought to copy. Even at the age of thirteen I 
had tried to do justice to the inhabitants of the 
famous city of Peebles in the style of the Book 
of Snobs. So I might go on for ever, through 
all my abortive novels, and down to my later 
plays, of which I think more tenderly, for they 
were not only conceived at first under the brac- 
ing influence of old Dumas, but have met with 
resurrections: one, strangely bettered by an- 
other hand, came on the stage itself and was 
played by bodily actors; the other, originally 
known as Semiramis: a Tragedy, I have ob- 
served on bookstalls under the alias of Prince 
Otto. But enough has been said to show by 
what arts of impersonation, and in what purely 
ventriloquial efforts I first saw my words on 
paper. 

That, like it or not, is the way to learn to 
write; whether I have profited or not, that is 
the way. It was so Keats learned, and there \/ 
was never a finer temperament for literature 
than Keats's; it was so, if we could trace it 
out, that all men have learned; and that is why 



STEVENSON TAUGHT HIMSELF 5 

a revival of letters is always accompanied or 
heralded by a cast back to earlier and fresher 
models. Perhaps I hear some one cry out: But 
this is not the way to be original! It is not; 
nor is there any way but to be born so. Nor 
yet, if you are born original, is there anything 
in this training that shall clip the wings of your 
originality. There can be none more original 
than Montaigne, neither could any be more 
unlike Cicero; yet no craftsman can fail to see 
how much the one must have tried in his time 
to imitate the other. Burns is the very type 
of a prime force in letters: he was of all men the 
most imitative. Shakespeare himself, the im- 
perial, proceeds directly from a school. It is 
only from a school that we can expect to have 
good writers; it is almost invariably from a 
school that great writers, these lawless excep- 
tions, issue. Nor is there anything here that 
should astonish the considerate. Before he 
can tell what cadences he truly prefers, the 
student should have tried all that are possible; 
before he can choose and preserve a fitting key 
of words, he should long have practised the 
literary scales; and it is only after years of such 
gymnastic that he can sit down at last, legions 
of words swarming to his call, dozens of turns 
of phrase simultaneously bidding for his choice, 
and he himself knowing what he wants to do 



6 LEARNING TO WRITE 

and (within the narrow limit of a man's abil- 
ity) able to do it. 

And it is the great point of these imitations 
that there still shines beyond the student's 
reach his inimitable model. Let him try as he 
please, he is still sure of failure; and it is a very 
old and a very true saying that failure is the 
only highroad to success. I must have had 
some disposition to learn; for I clear-sightedly 
condemned my own performances. I liked 
doing them indeed; but when they were done, 
I could see they were rubbish. In consequence, 
I very rarely showed them even to my friends; 
and such friends as I chose to be my con- 
fidants I must have chosen well, for they had 
the friendliness to be quite plain with me. 
"Padding," said one. Another wrote: "I can- 
not understand why you do lyrics so badly." 
No more could I ! Thrice I put myself in the 
way of a more authoritative rebuff, by sending 
a paper to a magazine. These were returned; 
and I was not surprised nor even pained. If 
they had not been looked at, as (like all ama- 
teurs) I suspected was the case, there was no 
good in repeating the experiment; if they had 
been looked at — well, then I had not yet learned 
to write, and I must keep on learning and 
living. 



II 



LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN 

WHO PROPOSES TO EMBRACE 

THE CAREER OF ART 

With the agreeable frankness of youth, you 
address me on a point of some practical im- 
portance to yourself and (it is even conceiv- 
able) of some gravity to the world: Should you 
or should you not become an artist? It is one 
which you must decide entirely for yourself; 
all that I can do is to bring under your notice 
some of the materials of that decision; and I 
will begin, as I shall probably conclude also, by 
assuring you that all depends on the vocation. 

To know what you like is the beginning of 
wisdom and of old age. Youth is wholly ex- 
perimental. The essence and charm of that 
unquiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of 
self as well as ignorance of life. These two 
unknowns the young man brings together 
again and again, now in the airiest touch, now 
with a bitter hug; now with exquisite pleasure, 
now with cutting pain; but never with indiffer- 
ence, to which he is a total stranger, and never 
7 



8 LEARNING TO WRITE 

with that near kinsman of indifference, con- 
tentment. If he be a youth of dainty senses 
or a brain easily heated, the interest of this 
series of experiments grows upon him out of 
all proportion to the pleasure he receives. It 
is not beauty that he loves, nor pleasure that 
he seeks, though he may think so; his design 
and his sufficient reward is to verify his own 
existence and taste the variety of human fate. 
To him, before the razor-edge of curiosity is 
dulled, all that is not actual living and the hot 
chase of experience wears a face of a disgusting 
dryness difficult to recall in later days; or if 
there be any exception — and here destiny steps 
in — it is in those moments when, wearied or 
surfeited of the primary activity of the senses, 
he calls up before memory the image of trans- 
acted pains and pleasures. Thus it is that such 
an one shies from all cut-and-dry professions, 
and inclines insensibly toward that career of 
art which consists only in the tasting and re- 
cording of experience. 

This, which is not so much a vocation for 
art as an impatience of all other honest trades, 
frequently exists alone; and so existing, it will 
pass gently away in the course of years. Em- 
phatically, it is not to be regarded; it is not a 
vocation, but a temptation; and when your 
father the other day so fiercely and (in my 



TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN 9 

view) so properly discouraged your ambition, 
he was recalling not improbably some similar 
passage in his own experience. For the temp- 
tation is perhaps nearly as common as the 
vocation is rare. But again we have vocations 
which are imperfect; we have men whose minds 
are bound up, not so much in any art, as in 
the general ars artium and common base of all 
creative work; who will now dip into painting, 
and now study counterpoint, and anon will be 
inditing a sonnet: all these with equal interest, 
all often with genuine knowledge. And of this 
temper, when it stands alone, I find it difficult 
to speak; but I should counsel such an one to 
take to letters, for in literature (which drags 
with so wide a net) all his information may be 
found some day useful, and if he should go on 
as he has begun, and turn at last into the 
critic, he will have learned to use the necessary 
tools. Lastly we come to those vocations 
which are at once decisive and precise; to the 
men who are born with the love of pigments, 
the passion of drawing, the gift of music, or 
the impulse to create with words, just as other 
and perhaps the same men are born with the 
love of hunting, or the sea, or horses, or the 
turning-lathe. These are predestined; if a man 
love the labour of any trade, apart from any 
question of success or fame, the gods have 



io LEARNING TO WRITE 

called him. He may have the general vocation 
too: he may have a taste for all the arts, and I 
think he often has; but the mark of his calling 
is this laborious partiality for one, this inex- 
tinguishable zest in its technical successes, and 
(perhaps above all) a certain candour of mind, 
to take his very trifling enterprise with a grav- 
ity that would befit the cares of empire, and to 
think the smallest improvement worth accom- 
plishing at any expense of time and industry. 
The book, the statue, the sonata, must be gone 
upon with the unreasoning good faith and the 
unflagging spirit of children at their play. Is 
it worth doing? — when it shall have occurred 
to any artist to ask himself that question, it is 
implicitly answered in the negative. It does 
not occur to the child as he plays at being a 
pirate on the dining-room sofa, nor to the 
hunter as he pursues his quarry; and the can- 
dour of the one and the ardour of the other 
should be united in the bosom of the artist. 

If you recognise in yourself some such de- 
cisive taste, there is no room for hesitation: 
follow your bent. And observe (lest I should 
too much discourage you) that the disposition 
does not usually burn so brightly at the first, 
or rather not so constantly. Habit and prac- 
tice sharpen gifts; the necessity of toil grows 
less disgusting, grows even welcome, in the 



TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN n 

course of years; a small taste (if it be only 
genuine) waxes with indulgence into an ex- 
clusive passion. Enough, just now, if you can 
look back over a fair interval, and see that 
your chosen art has a little more than held its 
own among the thronging interests of youth. 
Time will do the rest, if devotion help it; and 
soon your every thought will be engrossed in 
that beloved occupation. 

But even with devotion, you may remind 
me, even with unfaltering and delighted in- 
dustry, many thousand artists spend their 
lives, if the result be regarded, utterly in vain: 
a thousand artists, and never one work of art. 
But the vast mass of mankind are incapable of 
doing anything reasonably well, art among the 
rest. The worthless artist would not improb- 
ably have been a quite incompetent baker. 
And the artist, even if he does not amuse the 
public, amuses himself; so that there will al- 
ways be one man the happier for his vigils. 
This is the practical side of art: its inexpug- 
nable fortress for the true practitioner. The di- 
rect returns — the wages of the trade — are 
small, but the indirect — the wages of the life — , 
are incalculably great. No other business offers 
a man his daily bread upon such joyful terms. 
The soldier and the explorer have moments of 
a worthier excitement, but they are purchased 



12 LEARNING TO WRITE 

by cruel hardships and periods of tedium that 
beggar language. In the life of the artist there 
need be no hour without its pleasure. I take 
the author, with whose career I am best ac- 
quainted; and it is true he works in a rebellious 
material, and that the act of writing is cramped 
and trying both to the eyes and the temper; 
but remark him in his study, when matter 
crowds upon him and words are not wanting — in 
what a continual series of small successes time 
flows by; with what a sense of power as of one 
moving mountains, he marshals his petty char- 
acters; with what pleasures, both of the ear 
and eye, he sees his airy structure growing on 
the page; and how he labours in a craft to 
which the whole material of his life is tributary, 
and which opens a door to all his tastes, his 
loves, his hatreds, and his convictions, so that 
what he writes is only what he longed to utter. 
He may have enjoyed many things in this big, 
tragic playground of the world; but what shall 
he have enjoyed more fully than a morning of 
successful work? Suppose it ill paid: the 
wonder is it should be paid at all. Other men 
pay, and pay dearly, for pleasures less desir- 
able. 

Nor will the practice of art afford you pleas- 
ure only; it affords besides an admirable train- 
ing. For the artist works entirely upon hon- 



TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN 13 

our. The public knows little or nothing of 
those merits in the quest of which you are con- 
demned to spend the bulk of your endeavours. 
Merits of design, the merit of first-hand en- 
ergy, the merit of a certain cheap accomplish- 
ment which a man of the artistic temper easily 
acquires — these they can recognise, and these 
they value. But to those more exquisite re- 
finements of proficiency and finish, which the 
artist so ardently desires and so keenly feels, 
for which (in the vigorous words of Balzac) he 
must toil "like a miner buried in a landslip," 
for which, day after day, he recasts and revises 
and rejects — the gross mass of the public must 
be ever blind. To those lost pains, suppose 
you attain the highest pitch of merit, posterity 
may possibly do justice; suppose, as is so prob- 
able, you fail by even a hair's breadth of the 
highest, rest certain they shall never be ob- 
served. Under the shadow of this cold thought, 
alone in his studio, the artist must preserve 
from day to day his constancy to the ideal. It 
is this which makes his life noble; it is by this 
that the practice of his craft strengthens and ma- 
tures his character; it is for this that even the 
serious countenance of the great emperor was 
turned approvingly (if only for a moment) on 
the followers of Apollo, and that sternly gentle 
voice bade the artist cherish his art. 



i 4 LEARNING TO WRITE 

And here there fall two warnings to be made. 
First, if you are to continue to be a law to your- 
self, you must beware of the first signs of lazi- 
ness. This idealism in honesty can only be 
supported by perpetual effort; the standard is 
easily lowered, the artist who says "It will 
do" is on the downward path; three or four 
pot-boilers are enough at times (above all at 
wrong times) to falsify a talent, and by the prac- 
tice of journalism a man runs the risk of be- 
coming wedded to cheap finish. This is the 
danger on the one side; there is not less upon 
the other. The consciousness of how much the 
artist is (and must be) a law to himself, de- 
bauches the small heads. Perceiving recondite 
merits very hard to attain, making or swallow- 
ing artistic formulae, or perhaps falling in love 
with some particular proficiency of his own, 
many artists forget the end of all art: to please. 
It is doubtless tempting to exclaim against the 
ignorant bourgeois; yet it should not be for- 
gotten, it is he who is to pay us, and that 
(surely on the face of it) for services that he 
shall desire to have performed. Here also, if 
properly considered, there is a question of 
transcendental honesty. To give the public 
what they do not want, and yet expect to be 
supported: we have there a strange pretension, 
and yet not uncommon, above all with painters. 



TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN 15 

The first duty in this world is for a man to pay 
his way; when that is quite accomplished, he 
may plunge into what eccentricity he likes; but 
emphatically not till then. Till then, he must 
pay assiduous court to the bourgeois who 
carries the purse. And if in the course of these 
capitulations he shall falsify his talent, it can 
never have been a strong one, and he will have 
preserved a better thing than talent — char- 
acter. Or if he be of a mind so independent 
that he cannot stoop to this necessity, one 
course is yet open: he can desist from art, and 
follow some more manly way of life. 

I speak of a more manly way of life, it is a 
point on which I must be frank. To live by a 
pleasure is not a high calling; it involves pat- 
ronage, however veiled; it numbers the artist, 
however ambitious, along with dancing girls 
and billiard markers. The French have a ro- 
mantic evasion for one employment, and call its 
practitioners the Daughters of Joy. The artist 
is of the same family, he is of the Sons of Joy, 
chose his trade to please himself, gains his liveli- 
hood by pleasing others, and has parted with 
something of the sterner dignity of man. Jour- 
nals but a little while ago declaimed against 
the Tennyson peerage; and this Son of Joy was 
blamed for condescension when he followed the 
example of Lord Lawrence and Lord Cairns and 



16 LEARNING TO WRITE 

Lord Clyde. The poet was more happily in- 
spired; with a better modesty he accepted the 
honour; and anonymous journalists have not 
yet (if I am to believe them) recovered the 
vicarious disgrace to their profession. When it 
comes to their turn, these gentlemen can do 
themselves more justice; and I shall be glad to 
think of it; for to my barbarian eyesight, even 
Lord Tennyson looks somewhat out of place in 
that assembly. There should be no honours 
for the artist; he has already, in the practice of 
his art, more than his share of the rewards of 
life; the honours are pre-empted for other 
trades, less agreeable and perhaps more useful. 

But the devil in these trades of pleasing is 
to fail to please. In ordinary occupations, a 
man offers to do a certain thing or to produce 
a certain article with a merely conventional 
accomplishment, a design in which (we may 
almost say) it is difficult to fail. But the artist 
steps forth out of the crowd and proposes to 
delight: an impudent design, in which it is im- 
possible to fail without odious circumstances. 
The poor Daughter of Joy, carrying her smiles 
and finery quite unregarded through the crowd, 
makes a figure which it is impossible to recall 
without a wounding pity. She is the type of 
the unsuccessful artist. The actor, the dancer, 
and the singer must appear like her in person, 



TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN 17 

and drain publicly the cup of failure. But 
though the rest of us escape this crowning bit- 
terness of the pillory, we all court in essence 
the same humiliation. We all profess to be 
able to delight. And how few of us are ! We 
all pledge ourselves to be able to continue to 
delight. And the day will come to each, and 
even to the most admired, when the ardour 
shall have declined and the cunning shall be 
lost, and he shall sit by his deserted booth 
ashamed. Then shall he see himself con- 
demned to do work for which he blushes to take 
payment. Then (as if his lot were not already 
cruel) he must lie exposed to the gibes of the 
wreckers of the press, who earn a little bitter 
bread by the condemnation of trash which they 
have not read, and the praise of excellence 
which they cannot understand. 

And observe that this seems almost the neces- 
sary end at least of writers. Les Blancs et les 
Bleus (for instance) is of an order of merit very 
different from Le Vicomte de Bragelonne; and 
if any gentleman can bear to spy upon the 
nakedness of Castle Dangerous, his name I 
think is Ham: let it be enough for the rest of 
us to read of it (not without tears) in the pages 
of Lockhart Thus in old age, when occupa- 
tion and comfort are most needful, the writer 
must lay aside at once his pastime and his 



18 LEARNING TO WRITE 

breadwinner. The painter indeed, if he suc- 
ceed at all in engaging the attention of the pub- 
lic, gains great sums and can stand to his 
easel until a great age without dishonourable 
failure. The writer has the double misfortune 
to be ill-paid while he can work, and to be in- 
capable of working when he is old. It is thus 
a way of life which conducts directly to a false 
position. 

For the writer (in spite of notorious examples 
to the contrary) must look to be ill-paid. 
Tennyson and Montepin make handsome live- 
lihoods; but we cannot all hope to be Tenny- 
son, and we do not all perhaps desire to be 
Montepin. If you adopt an art to be your 
trade, weed your mind at the outset of all de- 
sire of money. What you may decently expect, 
if you have some talent and much industry, is 
such an income as a clerk will earn with a tenth 
or perhaps a twentieth of your nervous output. 
Nor have you the right "to look for more; in the 
wages of the life, not in the wages of the trade, 
lies your reward; the work is here the wages. 
It will be seen I have little sympathy with the 
common lamentations of the artist class. Per- 
haps they do not remember the hire of the 
field labourer; or do they think no parallel will 
lie? Perhaps they have never observed what 
is the retiring allowance of a field officer; or do 



TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN 19 

they suppose their contributions to the arts of 
pleasing more important than the services of a 
colonel? Perhaps they forget on how little 
Millet was content to live; or do they think, 
because they have less genius, they stand ex- 
cused from the display of equal virtues? But 
upon one point there should be no dubiety: if a 
man be not frugal, he has no business in the 
arts. If he be not frugal, he steers directly for 
that last tragic scene of le vieux saltimbanque; 
if he be not frugal, he will find it hard to con- 
tinue to be honest. Some day, when the butcher 
is knocking at the door, he may be tempted, he 
may be obliged, to turn out and sell a slovenly 
piece of work. If the obligation shall have 
arisen through no wantonness of his own, he is 
even to be commended; for words cannot de- 
scribe how far more necessary it is that a man 
should support his family, than that he should 
attain to — or preserve — distinction in the arts. 
But if the pressure comes through his own 
fault, he has stolen, and stolen under trust, and 
stolen (which is the worst of all) in such a way 
that no law can reach him. 

And now you may perhaps ask me, if the 
debutant artist is to have no thought of money, 
and if (as is implied) he is to expect no honours 
from the State, he may not at least look for- 
ward to the delights of popularity? Praise, 



20 LEARNING TO WRITE 

you will tell me, is a savoury dish. And in so 
far as you may mean the countenance of other 
artists, you would put your finger on one of the 
most essential and enduring pleasures of the 
career of art. But in so far as you should have 
an eye to the commendations of the public or 
the notice of the newspapers, be sure you would 
but be cherishing a dream. It is true that in 
certain esoteric journals the author (for in- 
stance) is duly criticised, and that he is often 
praised a great deal more than he deserves, 
sometimes for qualities which he prided him- 
self on eschewing, and sometimes by ladies 
and gentlemen who have denied themselves 
the privilege of reading his work. But if a 
man be sensitive to this wild praise, we must 
suppose him equally alive to that which often 
accompanies and always follows it — wild ridi- 
cule. A man may have done well for years, 
and then he may fail; he will hear of his fail- 
ure. Or he may have done well for years, and 
still do well, but the critics may have tired of 
praising him, or there may have sprung up some 
new idol of the instant, some "dust a little 
gilt," to whom they now prefer to offer sacri- 
fice. Here is the obverse and the reverse of 
that empty and ugly thing called popularity. 
Will any man suppose it worth the gaining? 



in 

A NOTE ON REALISM * 

Style is the invariable mark of any master; 
and for the student who does not aspire so 
high as to be numbered with the giants, it is 
still the one quality in which he may improve 
himself at will. Passion, wisdom, creative 
force, the power of mystery or colour, are al- 
lotted in the hour of birth, and can be neither 
learned nor simulated. But the just and dex- 
terous use of what qualities we have, the pro- 
portion of one part to another and to the whole, 
the elision of the useless, the accentuation of 
the important, and the preservation of a uni- 
form character from end to end — these, which 
taken together constitute technical perfection, 
are to some degree within the reach of industry 
and intellectual courage. What to put in and 
what to leave out; whether some particular 
fact be organically necessary or purely orna- 
mental; whether, if it be purely ornamental, it 
may not weaken or obscure the general design; 
and finally, whether, if we decide to use it, we 
* First published in the Magazine of Art in 1883. 

21 



22 LEARNING TO WRITE 

should do so grossly and notably, or in some 
conventional disguise: are questions of plastic 
style continually rearising. And the sphinx 
that patrols the highways of executive art has 
no more unanswerable riddle to propound. 

In literature (from which I must draw my 
instances) the great change of the past century 
has been effected by the admission of detail. 
It was inaugurated by the romantic Scott; and 
at length, by the semi-romantic Balzac and his 
more or less wholly unromantic followers, bound 
like a duty on the novelist. For some time it 
signified and expressed a more ample contem- 
plation of the conditions of man's life; but it 
has recently (at least in France) fallen into a 
merely technical and decorative stage, which it 
is, perhaps, still too harsh to call survival. 
With a movement of alarm, the wiser or more 
timid begin to fall a little back from these ex- 
tremities; they begin to aspire after a more 
naked, narrative articulation; after the suc- 
cinct, the dignified, and the poetic; and as a 
means to this, after a general lightening of this 
baggage of detail. After Scott we beheld the 
starveling story — once, in the hands of Vol- 
taire, as abstract as a parable — begin to be 
pampered upon facts. The introduction of 
these details developed a particular ability of 
hand; and that ability, childishly indulged, has 



A NOTE ON REALISM 23 

led to the works that now amaze us on a rail- 
way journey. A man of the unquestionable 
force of M. Zola spends himself on technical 
successes. To afford a popular flavour and at- 
tract the mob, he adds a steady current of 
what I may be allowed to call the rancid. 
That is exciting to the moralist; but what more 
particularly interests the artist is this tendency 
of the extreme of detail, when followed as a 
principle, to degenerate into mere feux-de-joie 
of literary tricking. The other day even M. 
Daudet was to be heard babbling of audible 
colours and visible sounds. 

This odd suicide of one branch of the realists 
may serve to remind us of the fact which un- 
derlies a very dusty conflict of the critics. All 
representative art, which can be said to live, is 
both realistic and ideal; and the realism about 
which we quarrel is a matter purely of externals. 
It is no especial cultus of nature and veracity, 
but a mere whim of veering fashion, that has 
made us turn our back upon the larger, more 
various, and more romantic art of yore. A 
photographic exactitude in dialogue is now the 
exclusive fashion; but even in the ablest hands 
it tells us no more — I think it even tells us less 
— than Moliere, wielding his artificial medium, 
has told to us and to all time of Alceste or 
Orgon, Dorine or Chrysale. The historical 



24 LEARNING TO WRITE 

novel is forgotten. Yet truth to the conditions 
of man's nature and the conditions of man's 
life, the truth of literary art, is free of the ages. 
It may be told us in a carpet comedy, in a 
novel of adventure, or a fairy tale. The scene 
may be pitched in London, on the sea-coast of 
Bohemia, or away on the mountains of Beulah. 
And by an odd and luminous accident, if there 
is any page of literature calculated to awake 
the envy of M. Zola, it must be that Troilus 
and Cressida which Shakespeare, in a spasm of 
unmanly anger with the world, grafted on the 
heroic story of the siege of Troy. 

This question of realism, let it then be clearly 
understood, regards not in the least degree the 
fundamental truth, but only the technical 
method, of a work of art. Be as ideal or as 
abstract as you please, you will be none the 
less veracious; but if you be weak, you run the 
risk of being tedious and inexpressive; and if 
you be very strong and honest, you may chance 
upon a masterpiece. 

A work of art is first cloudily conceived in 
the mind; during the period of gestation it 
stands more clearly forward from these swad- 
dling mists, puts on expressive lineaments, and 
becomes at length that most faultless, but also, 
alas! that incommunicable product of the hu- 
man mind, a perfected design. On the ap- 



A NOTE ON REALISM 25 

proach to execution all is changed. The artist 
must now step down, don his working clothes, 
and become the artisan. He now resolutely 
commits his airy conception, his delicate Ariel, 
to the touch of matter; he must decide, almost 
in a breath, the scale, the style, the spirit, and 
the particularity of execution of his whole de- 
sign. 

The engendering idea of some works is sty- 
listic; a technical preoccupation stands them 
instead of some robuster principle of life. And 
with these the execution is but play; for the 
stylistic problem is resolved beforehand, and 
all large originality of treatment wilfully fore- 
gone. Such are the verses, intricately designed, 
which we have learnt to admire, with a certain 
smiling admiration, at the hands of Mr. Lang 
and Mr. Dobson; such, too, are those canvases 
where dexterity or even breadth of plastic style 
takes the place of pictorial nobility of design. 
So, it may be remarked, it was easier to begin 
to write Esmond than Vanity Fair, since, in 
the first, the style was dictated by the nature 
of the plan; and Thackeray, a man probably of 
some indolence of mind, enjoyed and got good 
profit of this economy of effort. But the case 
is exceptional. Usually in all works of art that 
have been conceived from within outwards, 
and generously nourished from the author's 



26 LEARNING TO WRITE 

mind, the moment in which he begins to jlexe- 
cute is one of extreme perplexity and strain. 
Artists of indifferent energy and an imperafect 
devotion to their own ideal make this ungrate- 
ful effort once for all; and, having formec;! a 
style, adhere to it through life. But those oil a 
higher order cannot rest content with a process 
which, as they continue to employ it, must in- 
fallibly degenerate towards the academic arid 
the cut-and-dried. Every fresh work in whicih 
they embark is the signal for a fresh engage) - 
ment of the whole forces of their mind; and the ; 
changing views which accompany the growth of 
their experience are marked by still more sweeps 
ing alterations in the manner of their art. Soj 
that criticism loves to dwell upon and distin- | 
guish the varying periods of a Raphael, a 
Shakespeare, or a Beethoven. 

It is, then, first of all, at this initial and de- 
cisive moment when execution is begun, and 
thenceforth only in a less degree, that the ideal 
and the real do indeed, like good and evil 
angels, contend for the direction of the work. 
Marble, paint, and language, the pen, the 
needle, and the brush, all have their gross- 
nesses, their ineffable impotences, their hours, 
if I may so express myself, of insubordination. 
It is the work and it is a great part of the delight 
of any artist to contend with these unruly 



A NOTE ON REALISM 27 

tools, and now by brute energy, now by witty 
expedient, to drive and coax them to effect his 
will. Given these means, so laughably inade- 
quate, and given the interest, the intensity, and 
the multiplicity of the actual sensation whose 
effect he is to render with their aid, the artist 
has one main and necessary resource which he 
must, in every case and upon any theory, em- 
ploy. He must, that is, suppress much and 
omit more. He must omit what is tedious or 
irrelevant, and suppress what is tedious and 
necessary. But such facts as, in regard to the 
main design, subserve a variety of purposes, he 
will perforce and eagerly retain. And it is the 
mark of the very highest order of creative art 
to be woven exclusively of such. There, any 
fact that is registered is contrived a double or a 
treble debt to pay, and is at once an ornament 
in its place, and a pillar in the main design. 
Nothing would find room in such a picture 
that did not serve, at once, to complete the 
composition, to accentuate the scheme of col- 
our, to distinguish the planes of distance, and 
to strike the note of the selected sentiment; 
nothing would be allowed in such a story that 
did not, at the same time, expedite the prog- 
ress of the fable, build up the characters, and 
strike home the moral or the philosophical de- 
sign. But this is unattainable. As a rule, so 



28 LEARNING TO WRITE 

far from building the fabric of our works ex- 
clusively with these, we are thrown into a 
rapture if we think we can muster a dozen or a 
score of them, to be the plums of our confection. 
And hence, in order that the canvas may be 
filled or the story proceed from point to point, 
other details must be admitted. They must be 
admitted, alas! upon a doubtful title; many 
without marriage robes. Thus any work of 
art, as it proceeds towards completion, too often 
— I had almost written always— loses in force 
and poignancy of main design. Our little air 
is swamped and dwarfed among hardly relevant 
orchestration; our little passionate story drowns 
in a deep sea of descriptive eloquence or slip- 
shod talk. 

But again, we are rather more tempted to 
admit those particulars which we know we can 
describe; and hence those most of all which, 
having been described very often, have grown 
to be conventionally treated in the practice of 
our art. These we choose, as the mason chooses 
the acanthus to adorn his capital, because they 
come naturally to the accustomed hand. The 
old stock incidents and accessories, tricks of 
workmanship and schemes of composition (all 
being admirably good, or they would long have 
been forgotten) haunt and tempt oiir fancy, 
offer us ready-made but not perfectly appro- 



A NOTE ON REALISM 29 

priate solutions for any problem that arises, 
and wean us from the study of nature and the 
uncompromising practice of art. To struggle, 
to face nature, to find fresh solutions, and give 
expression to facts which have not yet been 
adequately or not yet elegantly expressed, is 
to run a little upon the danger of extreme self- 
love. Difficulty sets a high price upon achieve- 
ment; and the artist may easily fall into the 
error of the French naturalists, and consider 
any fact as welcome to admission if it be the 
ground of brilliant handiwork; or, again, into 
the error of the modern landscape-painter, who 
is apt to think that difficulty overcome and 
science well displayed can take the place of 
what is, after all, the one excuse and breath of 
art — charm. A little further, and he will re- 
gard charm in the light of an unworthy sacri- 
fice to prettiness, and the omission of a tedious 
passage as an infidelity to art. 

We have now the matter of this difference 
before us. The idealist, his eye singly fixed 
upon the greater outlines, loves rather to fill up 
the interval with detail of the conventional 
order, briefly touched, soberly suppressed in 
tone, courting neglect. But the realist, with a 
fine intemperance, will not suffer the presence 
of anything so dead as a convention; he shall 
have all fiery, all hot-pressed from nature, all 



3 o LEARNING TO WRITE 

charactered and notable, seizing the eye. The 
style that befits either of these extremes, once 
chosen, brings with it its necessary disabilities 
and dangers. The immediate danger of the 
realist is to sacrifice the beauty and significance 
of the whole to local dexterity, or, in the insane 
pursuit of completion, to immolate his readers 
under facts; but he comes in the last resort, 
and as his energy declines, to discard all de- 
sign, abjure all choice, and, with scientific thor- 
oughness, steadily to communicate matter 
which is not worth learning. The danger of 
the idealist is, of course, to become merely null 
and lose all grip of fact, particularity, or passion. 
We talk of bad and good. Everything, in- 
deed, is good which is conceived with honesty 
and executed with communicative ardour. But 
though on neither side is dogmatism fitting, and 
though in every case the artist must decide for 
himself, and decide afresh and yet afresh for 
each succeeding work and new creation; yet 
one thing may be generally said, that we of the 
last quarter of the nineteenth century, breath- 
ing as we do the intellectual atmosphere of our 
age, are more apt to err upon the side of realism 
than to sin in quest of the ideal. Upon that 
theory it may be well to watch and correct our 
own decisions, always holding back the hand 
from the least appearance of irrelevant dexter- 



A NOTE ON REALISM 31 

ity, and resolutely fixed to begin no work, that 
is not philosophical, passionate, dignified, hap- 
pily mirthful, or, at the last and least, romantic 
in design. 



IV 



BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED 
ME* 

The Editor f has somewhat insidiously laid a 
trap for his correspondents, the question put 
appearing it first so innocent, truly cutting so 
deep. It is not, indeed, until after some recon- 
naissance and review that the writer awakes to 
find himself engaged upon something in the 
nature of autobiography, or, perhaps worse, 
upon a chapter in the life of that little, beautiful 
brother whom we once all had, and whom we 
have all lost and mourned, the man we ought 
to have been, the man we hoped to be. But 
when word has been passed (even to an editor) 
it should, if possible, be kept; and if some- 
times I am wise and say too little, and some- 
times weak and say too much, the blame must 
lie at the door of the person who entrapped me. 

The most influential books, and the truest in 
their influence, are works of fiction. They do 
not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must 

* First published in the British Weekly, May 13, 1887. 
t Of the British Weekly. 

32 



BOOKS WHICH INFLUENCED ME 33 

afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not 
teach him a lesson, which he must afterwards 
unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they 
clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us 
from ourselves, they constrain us to the ac- 
quaintance of others; and they show us the 
web of experience, not as we can see it for our- 
selves, but with a singular change — that mon- 
strous, consuming ego of ours being, for the 
nonce, struck out. To be so, they must be 
reasonably true to the human comedy; and any 
work that is so serves the turn of instruction. 
But the course of our education is answered 
best by those poiems and romances where we 
breathe a magnan imous atmosphere of thought 
and meet generous and pious characters. 
Shakespeare has served me best. Few living 
friends have had upon me an influence so 
strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. The 
last character, already well beloved in the read- 
ing, I had the good -fortune to see, I must think, 
in an impressionable hour, played by Mrs. 1 
Scott Siddons. Nothing has ever more moved, 
more delighted, moro* refreshed me; nor has the 
influence quite passed away. Kent's brief 
speech over the dyin^ Lear had a great effect 
upon my mind, and ^ r as the burthen of my re- 
flections for long, so profoundly, so touchingly 
generous did it appear in sense, so overpowering 
I 



34 LEARNING TO WIjtITE 

in expression. Perhaps my dearest and best 
friend outside of Shakespeare ijs D'Artagnan — 
the elderly D'Artagnan of the Vicomte de 
Bragelonne. I know not a more human soul, 
nor, in his way, a finer; I shall be very sorry for 
the man who is so much of a pedant in morals 
that he cannot learn from the (Captain of Mus- 
keteers. Lastly, I must naAie the Pilgrim's 
Progress , a book that breathes of every beauti- 
ful and valuable emotion. 

But of works of art little q:an be said; their 
influence is profound and silent, like the influ- 
ence of nature; they mould by contact; we drink 
them up like water, and are bettered, yet know 
not how. It is in books more specifically di- 
dactic that we can follow out the effect, and 
distinguish and weigh and compare. A book 
which has been very influential upon me fell 
early into my hands, and ,o may stand first, 
though I think its influence was only sensible 
later on, and perhaps stillj keeps growing, for 
it is a book not easily outlived: the Essais of 
Montaigne. That temperate and genial pic- 
ture of life is a great gift to place in the hands 
of persons of to-day; th^y will find in these 
smiling pages a magazine of heroism and wis- 
dom, all of an antique strain; they will have 
their " linen decencies'" and excited ortho- 
doxies fluttered, and Will (if they have any 



BOOKS WHICH INFLUENCED ME 35 

gift of reading) perceive that these have not 
been fluttered without some excuse and ground 
of reason; and (again if they have any gift of 
reading) they will end by seeing that this old 
gentleman was in a dozen ways a finer fellow, 
and held in a dozen ways a nobler view of life, 
than they or their contemporaries. 

The next book, in order of time, to influence 
me, was the New Testament, and in particular 
the Gospel according to St. Matthew. I be- 
lieve it would startle and move any one if they 
could make a certain effort of imagination and 
read it freshly like a book, not droningly and 
dully like a portion of the Bible. Any one 
would then be able to see in it those truths 
which we are all courteously supposed to know 
and all n.odestly refrain from applying. But 
upon this subject it is perhaps better to be 
silent. 

I come next to Whitman's Leaves of Grass, a 
book of singular service, a book which tumbled 
the world upside down for me, blew into space 
a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical il- 
lusion, and, having thus shaken my tabernacle 
of lies, set me back again upon a strong founda- 
tion of all the original and manly virtues. But 
it is, once jmore, only a book for those who have 
the gift of reading. I will be very frank — I be- 
lieve it is so with all good books except, per- 



36 LEARNING TO WRITE 

haps, fiction. The average man lives, and must 
live, so wholly in convention, that gunpowder 
charges of the truth are more apt to discompose 
than to invigorate his creed. Either he cries 
out upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches 
the closer round that little idol of part-truths 
and part-conveniences which is the contempo- 
rary deity, or he is convinced by what is new, 
forgets what is old, and becomes truly blas- 
phemous and indecent himself. New truth is 
only useful to supplement the old; rough truth 
is only wanted to expand, not to destroy, our 
civil and often elegant conventions [ He who 
cannot judge had better stick to fict on and the 
daily papers. There he will get little harm, 
and, in the first at least, some good. 

Close upon the back of my discovery of 
Whitman, I came under the influence of Her- 
bert Spencer. No more persuasive rabbi ex- 
ists, and few better. How much of his vast 
structure will bear the touch of time, how 
much is clay and how much brass, it were too 
curious to inquire. But his words, if dry, are 
always manly and honest; there dwells in his 
pages a spirit of highly abstract joy, plucked 
naked like an algebraic symbol but : still joyful; 
and the reader will find there a capi\it mortuum 
of piety, with little indeed of its loveliness, but 
with most of its essentials; and these two qual- 



BOOKS WHICH INFLUENCED ME 37 

ities make him a wholesome, as his intellectual 
vigour makes him a bracing, writer. I should 
be much of a hound if I lost my gratitude to 
Herbert Spencer. 

Goethe's Life, by Lewes, had a great impor- 
tance for me when it first fell into my hands — a 
strange instance of the partiality of man's 
good and man's evil. I know no one whom I 
less admire than Goethe; he seems a very epit- 
ome of the sins of genius, breaking open the 
doors of private life, and wantonly wounding 
friends, in that crowning offence of Werther, 
and in his own character a mere pen-and-ink 
Napoleon, conscious of the rights and duties 
of superior talents as a Spanish inquisitor was 
conscious of the rights and duties of his office. 
And yet in his fine devotion to his art, in his 
honest and serviceable friendship for Schiller, 
what lessons are contained! Biography, usu- 
ally so false to its office, does here for once 
perform for us some of the work of fiction, re- 
minding us, that is, of the truly mingled tissue 
of man's nature, and how huge faults and shin- 
ing virtues cohabit and persevere in the same 
character. History serves us well to this effect, 
but in the originals, not in the pages of the 
popular epitomiser, who is bound, by the very 
nature of his task, to make us feel the difference 
of epochs instead of the essential identity of 



38 / LEARNING TO WRITE 

man, and even in the originals only to those 
who can recognise their own human virtues and 
defects in strange forms, often inverted and 
under strange names, often interchanged. Mar- 
tial is a poet of no good repute, and it gives a 
man new thoughts to read his works dispassion- 
ately, and find in this unseemly jester's serious 
passages the image of a kind, wise, and self- 
respecting gentleman. It is customary, I sup- 
pose, in reading Martial, to leave out these 
pleasant verses; I never heard of them, at 
least, until I found them for myself; and this 
partiality is one among a thousand things that 
help to build up our distorted and hysterical 
conception of the great Roman Empire. 

This brings us by a natural transition to a 
very noble book — the Meditations of Marcus 
Aurelius. The dispassionate gravity, the noble 
forgetfulness of self, the tenderness of others, 
that are there expressed and were practised on 
so great a scale in the life of its writer, make 
this book a book quite by itself. No one can 
read it and not be moved. Yet it scarcely or 
rarely appeals to the feelings — those very mo- 
bile, those not very trusty parts of man. Its 
address lies further back: its lesson com.es 
more deeply home; when you have read, you 
carry away with you a memory of the man 



BOOKS WHICH INFLUENCED ME 39 

himself; it is as though you had touched a loyal 
hand, looked into brave eyes, and made a noble 
friend; there is another bond on you thencefor- 
ward, binding you to life and to the love of 
virtue. 

Wordsworth should perhaps come next. 
Every one has been influenced by Wordsworth, 
and it is hard to tell precisely how. A certain 
innocence, a rugged austerity of 'joy, a sight of 
the stars, "the silence that is in the lonely 
hills/' something of the cold thrill of dawn, 
cling to his work and give it a particular ad- 
dress to what is best in us. I do not know that 
you learn a lesson; you need not — Mill did not 
— agree with any one of his beliefs; and yet 
the spell is cast. Such are the best teachers: a 
dogma learned is only a new error — the old one 
was perhaps as good; but a spirit communi- 
cated is a perpetual possession. These best 
teachers climb beyond teaching to the plane of 
art; it is themselves, and what is best in them- 
selves, that they communicate. 

I should never forgive myself if I forgot The 
Egoist. It is art, if you like, but it belongs 
purely to didactic art, and from all the novels 
I have read (and I have read thousands) stands 
in a place by itself. Here is a Nathan for the 
modern David; here is a book to send the blood 



4 o LEARNING TO WRITE 

into men's faces. Satire, the angry picture of 
human faults, is not great art; we can all be 
angry with our neighbour; what we want is to 
be shown, not his defects, of which we are too 
conscious, but his merits, to which we are too 
blind. And The Egoist is a satire; so much 
must be allowed; but it is a satire of a singular 
quality, which tells you nothing of that obvi- 
ous mote, which is engaged from first to last 
with that invisible beam. It is yourself that is 
hunted down; these are your own faults that 
are dragged into the day and numbered, with 
lingering relish, with cruel cunning and pre- 
cision. A young friend of Mr. Meredith's (as 
I have the story) came to him in an agony. 
"This is too bad of you," he cried. " Willoughby 
is me!" "No, my dear fellow," said the au- 
thor; "he is all of us." I have read The Egoist 
five or six times myself, and I mean to read it 
again; for I am like the young friend of the 
anecdote — I think Willoughby an unmanly 
but a very serviceable exposure of myself. 

I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that 
I have forgotten much that was most influen- 
tial, as I see already I have forgotten Thoreau, 
and Hazlitt, whose paper "On the Spirit of 
Obligations" was a turning-point in my life, 
and Penn, whose little book of aphorisms had a 



BOOKS WHICH INFLUENCED ME 41 

brief but strong effect on me, and Mitford's 
Tales of Old Japan, wherein I learned for the 
first time the proper attitude of any rational 
man to his country's laws — a secret found, and 
kept, in the Asiatic islands. That I should 
commemorate all is more than I can hope or 
the Editor could ask. It will be more to the 
point, after having said so much upon improv- 
ing books, to say a word or two about the im- 
provable reader. The gift of reading, as I have 
called it, is not very common, nor very generally 
understood. It consists, first of all, in a vast 
intellectual endowment — a free grace, I find I 
must call it — by which a man rises to under- 
stand that he is not punctually right, nor 
those from whom he differs absolutely wrong. 
He may hold dogmas; he may hold them pas- 
sionately; and he may know that others hold 
them but coldly, or hold them differently, or 
hold them not at all. Well, if he has the gift of 
reading, these others will be full of meat for 
him. They will see the other side of proposi- 
tions and the other side of virtues. He need not 
change his dogma for that, but he may change 
his reading of that dogma, and he must supple- 
ment and correct his deductions from it. A 
human truth, which is always very much a 
lie, hides as much of life as it displays. It is 



42 LEARNING TO WRITE 

men who hold another truth, or, as it seems to 
us, perhaps, a dangerous lie, who can extend 
our restricted field of knowledge, and rouse our 
drowsy consciences. Something that seems 
quite new, or that seems insolently false or 
very dangerous, is the test of a reader. If he 
tries to see what it means, what truth excuses 
it, he has the gift, and let him read. If he is 
merely hurt, or offended, or exclaims upon his 
author's folly, he had better take to the daily 
papers; he will never be a reader. 

And here, with the aptest illustrative force, 
after I have laid down my part-truth, I must 
step in with its opposite. For, after all, we are 
vessels of a very limited content. Not all men 
can read all books; it is only in a chosen few 
that any man will find his appointed food; and 
the fittest lessons are the most palatable, and 
make themselves welcome to the mind. A 
writer learns this early, and it is his chief sup- 
port; he goes on unafraid, laying down the law; 
and he is sure at heart that most of what he 
says is demonstrably false, and much of a 
mingled strain, and some hurtful, and very 
little good for service; but he is sure besides 
that when his words fall into the hands of any 
genuine reader, they will be weighed and win- 
nowed, and only that which suits will be as- 



BOOKS WHICH INFLUENCED ME 43 

similated; and when they fall into the hands 
of one who cannot intelligently read, they come 
there quite silent and inarticulate, falling upon 
deaf ears, and his secret is kept as if he had not 
written. 



V 

A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 

In anything fit to be called by the name of 
reading, the process itself should be absorbing 
and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, 
be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the 
perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, ka- 
leidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep 
or of continuous thought. The words, if the 
book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in 
our ears like the noise of breakers, and the 
story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand 
coloured pictures to the eye. It was for this 
last pleasure that we read so closely, and loved 
our books so dearly, in the bright, troubled 
period of boyhood. Eloquence and thought, 
character and conversation, were but obstacles 
to brush aside as we dug blithely after a cer- 
tain sort of incident, like a pig for truffles. 
For my part, I liked a story to begin with an 
old wayside inn where, " towards the close of 
the year 17 — ," several gentlemen in three- 
cocked hats were playing bowls. A friend of 
mine preferred the Malabar coast in a storm, 
with a ship beating to windward, and a scowling 
44 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 45 

fellow of Herculean proportions striding along 
the beach; he, to be sure, was a pirate. This 
was further afield than my home-keeping fancy 
loved to travel, and designed altogether for a 
larger canvas than the tales that I affected. 
Give me a highwayman and I was full to the 
brim; a Jacobite would do, but the highwayman 
was my favourite dish. I can still hear that 
merry clatter of the hoofs along the moonlit 
lane; night and the coming of day are still re- 
lated in my mind with the doings of John Rann 
or Jerry Abershaw; and the words "postchaise," 
the "great North road," "ostler," and "nag" 
still sound in my ears like poetry. One and all, 
at least, and each with his particular fancy, we 
read story-books in childhood, not for eloquence 
or character or thought, but for some quality 
of the brute incident. That quality was not 
mere bloodshed or wonder. Although each of 
these was welcome in its place, the charm for the 
sake of which we read depended on something 
different from either. My elders used to read 
novels aloud; and I can still remember four 
different passages which I heard, before I was 
ten, with the same keen and lasting pleasure. 
One I discovered long afterwards to be the ad- 
mirable opening of What will he Do with It: it 
was no wonder I was pleased with that. The 
other three still remain unidentified. One is a 



46 LEARNING TO WRITE 

little vague; it was about a dark, tall house at 
night, and people groping on the stairs by the 
light that escaped from the open door of a 
sickroom. In another, a lover left a ball, and 
went walking in a cool, dewy park, whence he 
could watch the lighted windows and the fig- 
ures of the dancers as they moved. This was 
the most sentimental impression I think I had 
yet received, for a child is somewhat deaf to 
the sentimental. In the last, a poet, who had 
been tragically wrangling with his wife, walked 
forth on the sea-beach on a tempestuous night 
and witnessed the horrors of a wreck.* Dif- 
ferent as they are, all these early favourites have 
a common note — they have all a touch of the 
romantic. 

Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the 
poetry of circumstance. The pleasure that we 
take in life is of two sorts — the active and the 
passive. Now we are conscious of a great 
command over our destiny; anon we are lifted 
up by circumstance, as by a breaking wave, and 
dashed we know not how into the future. Now 
we are pleased by our conduct, anon merely 
pleased by our surroundings. It would be 
hard to say which of these modes of satisfac- 
tion is the more effective, but the latter is 

* Since traced by many obliging correspondents to the gal- 
lery of Charles Kingsley. 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 47 

surely the more constant. Conduct is three 
parts of life, they say; but I think they put it 
high. There is a vast deal in life and letters 
both which is not immoral, but simply a-moral; 
which either does not regard the human will at 
all, or deals with it in obvious and healthy re- 
lations; where the interest turns, not upon 
what a man shall choose to do, but on how he 
manages to do it; not on the passionate slips 
and hesitations of the conscience, but on the 
problems of the body and of the practical in- 
telligence, in clean, open-air adventure, the 
shock of arms or the diplomacy of life. With 
such material as this it is impossible to build a 
play, for the serious theatre exists solely on 
moral grounds, and is a standing proof of the 
dissemination of the human conscience. But it 
is possible to build, upon this ground, the most 
joyous of verses, and the most lively, beautiful, 
and buoyant tales. 

One thing in life calls for another; there is a 
fitness in events and places. The sight of a 
pleasant arbour puts it in our mind to sit 
there. One place suggests work, another idle- 
ness, a third early rising and long rambles in 
the dew. The effect of night, of any flowing 
water, of lighted cities, of the peep of day, of 
ships, of the open ocean, calls up in the mind 
an army of anonymous desires and pleasures. 



48 LEARNING TO WRITE 

Something, we feel, should happen; we know 
not what, yet we proceed in quest of it. And 
many of the happiest hours of life fleet by us 
in this vain attendance on the genius of the 
place and moment. It is thus that tracts of 
young fir, and low rocks that reach into deep 
soundings, particularly torture and delight me. 
Something must have happened in such places, 
and perhaps ages back, to members of my race; 
and when I was a child I tried in vain to in- 
vent appropriate games for them, as I 'still 
try, just as vainly, to fit them with the proper 
story. Some places speak distinctly. Certain 
dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain 
old houses demand to be haunted; certain 
coasts are set apart for shipwreck. Other spots 
again seem to abide their destiny, suggestive 
and impenetrable, "miching mallecho." The 
inn at Burford Bridge, with its arbours and green 
garden and silent, eddying river — though it is 
known already as the place where Keats wrote 
some of his Endymion and Nelson parted from 
his Emma — still seems to wait the coming of 
the appropriate legend. Within these ivied 
walls, behind these old green shutters, some 
further business smoulders, waiting for its hour. 
The old Hawes Inn at the Queen's Ferry makes 
a similar call upon my fancy. There it stands, 
apart from the town, beside the pier, in a cli- 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 49 

mate of its own, half inland, half marine — in 
front, the ferry bubbling with the tide and the 
guardship swinging to her anchor; behind, the 
old garden with the trees. Americans seek it 
already for the sake of Lovel and Oldbuck, who 
dined there at the beginning of the Antiquary. 
But you need not tell me — that is not all; 
there is some story, unrecorded or not yet 
complete, which must express the meaning of 
that inn more fully. So it is with names and 
faces; so it is with incidents that are idle and 
inconclusive in themselves, and yet seem like 
the beginning of some quaint romance, which 
the all-careless author leaves untold. How 
many of these romances have we not seen de- 
termine at their birth; how many people have 
met us with a look of meaning in their eye, and 
sunk at once into trivial acquaintances^tplhow 
many places have we not drawn n^yr, with 
express intimations — "here my dest^V awaits 
me" — and we have but dined there and passed 
on ! I have lived both at the Hawes and Bur- 
ford in a perpetual flutter, on the heels, as it 
seemed, of some adventure that should justify 
the place; but though the feeling had me to 
bed at night and called me again at morning 
in one unbroken round of pleasure and sus- 
pense, nothing befell me in either worth re- 
mark. The man or the hour had not yet come; 



50 LEARNING TO WRITE 

but some day, I think, a boat shall put off from 
the Queen's Ferry, fraught with a dear cargo, 
and some frosty night a horseman, on a tragic 
errand, rattle with his whip upon the green 
shutters of the inn at Burford.* 

Now, this is one of the natural appetites with 
which any lively literature has to count. The 
desire for knowledge, I had almost added the 
desire for meat, is not more deeply seated than 
this demand for fit and striking incident. The 
dullest of clowns tells, or tries to tell, himself a 
story, as the feeblest of children uses invention 
in his play; and even as the imaginative grown 
person, joining in the game, at once enriches it 
with many delightful circumstances, the great 
creative writer shows us the realisation and the 
apotheosis of the day-dreams of common men. 
His stories may be nourished with the realities 
of life, but their true mark is to satisfy the 
nameless longings of the reader, and to obey the 
ideal laws of the day-dream. The right kind 
of thing should fall out in the right kind of 
place; the right kind of thing should follow; 
and not only the characters talk aptly and 
think naturally, but all the circumstances in a 
tale answer one to another like notes in music. 

* Since the above was written I have tried to launch the 
boat with my own hands in Kidnapped, Some day, perhaps, 
I may try a rattle at the shutters. 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 51 

The threads of a story come from time to time 
together and make a picture in the web; the 
characters fall from time to time into some at- 
titude to each other or to nature, which stamps 
the story home like an illustration. Crusoe 
recoiling from the footprint, Achilles shouting 
over against the Trojans, Ulysses bending the 
great bow, Christian running with his fingers 
in his ears, these are each culminating mo- 
ments in the legend, and each has been printed 
on the mind's eye forever. Other things we 
may forget; we may forget the words, although 
they are beautiful; we may forget the author's 
comment, although perhaps it was ingenious 
and true; but these epoch-making scenes, which 
put the last mark of truth upon a story and fill 
up, at one blow, our capacity for sympathetic 
pleasure, we so adopt into the very bosom of 
our mind that neither time nor tide can efface 
or weaken the impression. This, then, is the 
plastic part of literature: to embody character, 
thought, or emotion in some act or attitude 
that shall be remarkably striking to the mind's 
eye. This is the highest and hardest thing to 
do in words; the thing which, once accomplished, 
equally delights the schoolboy and the sage, 
and makes, in its own right, the quality of 
epics. Compared with this, all other purposes 
in literature, except the purely lyrical or the 



52 LEARNING TO WRITE 

purely philosophic, are bastard in nature, 
facile of execution, and feeble in result. It is 
one thing to write about the inn at Burford, or 
to describe scenery with the word-painters; it 
is quite another to seize on the heart of the 
suggestion and make a country famous with a 
legend. It is one thing to remark and to dis- 
sect, with the most cutting logic, the complica- 
tions of life, and of the human spirit; it is quite 
another to give them body and blood in the 
story of Ajax or of Hamlet. The first is litera- 
ture, but the second is something besides, for 
it is likewise art. 

English people of the present day* are apt, I 
know not why, to look somewhat down on in- 
cident, and reserve their admiration for the 
clink of teaspoons and the accents of the curate. 
It is thought clever to write a novel with no 
story at all, or at least with a very dull one. 
Reduced even to the lowest terms, a certain 
interest can be communicated by the art of 
narrative; a sense of human kinship stirred; 
and a kind of monotonous fitness, comparable 
to the words and air of Sandy's Mull, pre- 
served among the infinitesimal occurrences re- 
corded. Some people work, in this manner, 
with even a strong touch. Mr. Trollope's in- 
imitable clergymen naturally arise to the mind 
♦1882. 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 53 

in this connection. But even Mr. Trollope 
does not confine himself to chronicling small 
beer. Mr. Crawley's collision with the Bishop's 
wife, Mr. Melnette dallying in the deserted 
banquet-room, are typical incidents, epically 
conceived, fitly embodying a crisis. Or again 
look at Thackeray. If Rawdon Crawley's blow 
were not delivered, Vanity Fair would cease to 
be a work of art. That scene is the chief gan- 
glion of the tale; and the discharge of energy 
from Rawdon's fist is the reward and consola- 
tion of the reader. The end of Esmond is a 
yet wider excursion from the author's custom- 
ary fields; the scene at Castlewood is pure Du- 
mas; the great and wily English borrower has 
here borrowed from the great, unblushing 
French thief; as usual, he has borrowed admira- 
bly well, and the breaking of the sword rounds 
off the best of all his books with a manly, mar- 
tial note. But perhaps nothing can more 
strongly illustrate the necessity for marking in- 
cident than to compare the living fame of 
Robinson Crusoe with the discredit of Clarissa 
Earlowe. Clarissa is a book of a far more 
startling import, worked out, on a great can- 
vas, with inimitable courage and unflagging 
art. It contains wit, character, passion, plot, 
conversations full of spirit and insight, letters 
sparkling with unstrained humanity; and if the 



54 LEARNING TO WRITE 

death of the heroine be somewhat frigid and 
artificial, the last days of the hero strike the 
only note of what we now call Byronism, be- 
tween the Elizabethans and Byron himself. 
And yet a little story of a shipwrecked sailor, 
with not a tenth part of the style nor a thou- 
sandth part of the wisdom, exploring none of 
the arcana of humanity and deprived of the 
perennial interest of love, goes on from edition 
to edition, ever young, while Clarissa lies upon 
the shelves unread. A friend of mine, a Welsh 
blacksmith, was twenty-five years old and 
could neither read nor write, when he heard a 
chapter of Robinson read aloud in a farm kitchen. 
Up to that moment he had sat content, huddled 
in his ignorance, but he left that farm another 
man. There were day-dreams, it appeared, 
divine day-dreams, written and printed and 
bound, and to be bought for money and en- 
joyed at pleasure. Down he sat that day, 
painfully learned to read Welsh, and returned 
to borrow the book. It had been lost, nor 
could he find another copy but one that was in 
English. Down he sat once more, learned Eng- 
lish, and at length, and with entire delight, read 
Robinson. It is like the story of a love-chase. 
If he had heard a letter from Clarissa, would he 
have been fired with the same chivalrous ar- 
dour? I wonder. Yet Clarissa has every qual- 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 55 

ity that can be shown in prose, one alone ex- 
cepted — pictorial or picture-making romance. 
While Robinson depends, for the most part and 
with the overwhelming majority of its readers, 
on the charm of circumstance. 

In the highest achievements of the art of 
words, the dramatic and the pictorial, the moral 
and romantic interest, rise and fall together by 
a common and organic law. Situation is ani- 
mated with passion, passion clothed upon with 
situation. Neither exists for itself, but each 
inheres indissolubly with the other. This is 
high art; and not only the highest art possible 
in words, but the highest art of all, since it 
combines the greatest mass and diversity of the 
elements of truth and pleasure. Such are epics, 
and the few prose tales that have the epic 
weight. But as from a school of works, aping 
the creative, incident and romance are ruth- 
lessly discarded, so may character and drama 
be omitted or subordinated to romance. There 
is one book, for example, more generally loved 
than Shakespeare, that captivates in childhood, 
and still delights in age — I mean the Arabian 
Nights — where you shall look in vain for 
moral or for intellectual interest. No human 
face or voice greets us among that wooden 
crowd of kings and genies, sorcerers and beggar- 
men. Adventure, on the most naked terms, 



56 LEARNING TO WRITE 

furnishes forth the entertainment and is found 
enough. Dumas approaches perhaps nearest of 
any modern to these Arabian authors in the 
purely material charm of some of his romances. 
The early part of Monte Cristo, down to the 
finding of the treasure, is a piece of perfect 
story- telling; the man never breathed who 
shared these moving incidents without a tremor; 
and yet Faria is a thing of packthread and 
Dantes little more than a name. The sequel is 
one long-drawn error, gloomy, bloody, unnatural 
and dull; but as for these early chapters, I do 
not believe there is another volume extant 
where you can breathe the same unmingled at- 
mosphere of romance. It is very thin and 
light, to be sure, as on a high mountain; but 
it is brisk and clear and sunny in proportion. 
I saw the other day, with envy, an old and a 
very clever lady setting forth on a second or 
third voyage into Monte Cristo. Here are 
stories which powerfully affect the reader, which 
can be reperused at any age, and where the 
characters are no more than puppets. The 
bony fist of the showman visibly propels them; 
their springs are an open secret; their faces are 
of wood, their bellies filled with bran; and yet 
we thrillingly partake of their adventures. And 
the point may be illustrated still further. The 
last interview between Lucy and Richard Feverel 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 57 

is pure drama; more than that, it is the strong- 
est scene, since Shakespeare, in the English 
tongue. Their first meeting by the river, on 
the other hand, is pure romance; it has nothing 
to do with character; it might happen to any- 
other boy and maiden, and be none the less de- 
lightful for the change. And yet I think he 
would be a bold man who should choose be- 
tween these passages. Thus, in the same book, 
we may have two scenes, each capital in its 
order: in the one, human passion, deep calling 
unto deep, shall utter its genuine voice; in the 
second, according circumstances, like instru- 
ments in tune, shall build up a trivial but de- 
sirable incident, such as we love to prefigure for 
ourselves; and in the end, in spite of the critics, 
we may hesitate to give the preference to either. 
The one may ask more genius — I do not say it 
does; but at least the other dwells as clearly in 
the memory. 

True romantic art, again, makes a romance 
of all things. It reaches into the highest ab- 
straction of the ideal; it does not refuse the most 
pedestrian realism. Robinson Crusoe is as real- 
istic as it is romantic: both qualities are pushed 
to an extreme, and neither suffers. Nor does 
romance depend upon the material importance 
of the incidents. To deal with strong and deadly 
elements, banditti, pirates, war and murder, is 



58 LEARNING TO WRITE 

to conjure with great names, and, in the event 
of failure, to double the disgrace. The arrival 
of Haydn and Consuelo at the Canon's villa is a 
very trifling incident; yet we may read a dozen 
boisterous stories from beginning to end, and not 
receive so fresh and stirring an impression of 
adventure. It was the scene of Crusoe at the 
wreck, if I remember rightly, that so bewitched 
my blacksmith. Nor is the fact surprising. 
Every single article the castaway recovers from 
the hulk is "a joy for ever" to the man who 
reads of them. They are the things that should 
be found, and the bare enumeration stirs the 
blood. I found a glimmer of the same interest 
the other day in a new book, The Sailor's Sweet- 
heart, by Mr. Clark Russell. The whole busi- 
ness of the brig Morning Star is very rightly 
felt and spiritedly written; but the clothes, the 
books and the money satisfy the reader's mind 
like things to eat. We are dealing here with 
the old cut-and-dry, legitimate interest of treas- 
ure trove. But even treasure trove can be made 
dull. There are few people who have not 
groaned under the plethora of goods that fell 
to the lot of the Swiss Family Robinson, that 
dreary family. They found article after article, 
creature after creature, from milk kine to pieces 
of ordnance, a whole consignment; but no in- 
forming taste had presided over the selection, 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 59 

there was no smack or relish in the invoice; and 
these riches left the fancy cold. The box of 
goods in Verne's Mysterious Island is another 
case in point: there was no gusto and no glam- 
our about that; it might have come from a shop. 
But the two hundred and seventy-eight Aus- 
tralian sovereigns on board the Morning Star 
fell upon me like a surprise that I had expected; 
whole vistas of secondary stories, besides the 
one in hand, radiated forth from that discov- 
ery, as they radiate from a striking particular 
in life; and I was made for the moment as happy 
as a reader has the right to be. 

To come at all at the nature of this quality 
of romance, we must bear in mind the peculiar- 
ity of our attitude to any art. No art pro- 
duces illusion; in the theatre we never forget 
that we are in the theatre; and while we read 
a story, we sit wavering between two minds, 
now merely clapping our hands at the merit of 
the performance, now condescending to take 
an active part in fancy with the characters. 
This last is the triumph of romantic story- 
telling: when the reader consciously plays at 
being the hero, the scene is a good scene. Now 
in character-studies the pleasure that we take 
is critical; we watch, we approve, we smile at 
incongruities, we are moved to sudden heats of 
sympathy with courage, suffering or virtue. 



60 LEARNING TO WRITE 

But the characters are still themselves, they are 
not us; the more clearly they are depicted, the 
more widely do they stand away from us, the 
more imperiously do they thrust us back into 
our place as a spectator. I cannot identify 
myself with Rawdon Crawley or with Eugene 
de Rastignac, for I have scarce a hope or fear 
in common with them. It is not character but 
incident that woos us out of our reserve. Some- 
thing happens as we desire to have it happen to 
ourselves; some situation, that we have long 
dallied with in fancy, is realised in the story 
with enticing and appropriate details. Then 
we forget the characters; then we push the hero 
aside; then we plunge into the tale in our own 
person and bathe in fresh experience; and then, 
and then only, do we say we have been reading 
a romance. It is not only pleasurable things 
that we imagine in our day-dreams; there are 
lights in which we are willing to contemplate 
even the idea of our own death; ways in 
which it seems as if it would amuse us to be 
cheated, wounded or calumniated. It is thus 
possible to construct a story, even of tragic im- 
port, in which every incident, detail and trick 
of circumstance shall be welcome to the read- 
er's thoughts. Fiction is to the grown man 
what play is to the child; it is there that he 
changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life; 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 61 

and when the game so chimes with his fancy 
that he can join in it with all his heart, when it 
pleases him with every turn, when he loves to 
recall it and dwells upon its recollection with 
entire delight, fiction is called romance. 

Walter Scott is out and away the king of the 
romantics. The Lady of the Lake has no indis- 
putable claim to be a poem beyond the inherent 
fitness and desirability of the tale. It is just 
such a story as a man would make up for him- 
self, walking, in the best health and temper, 
through just such scenes as it is laid in. Hence 
it is that a charm dwells undefinable among 
these slovenly verses, as the unseen cuckoo fills 
the mountains with his note; hence, even after 
we have flung the book aside, the scenery and 
adventures remain present to the mind, a new 
and green possession, not unworthy of that 
beautiful name, The Lady of the Lake, or that 
direct, romantic opening, — one of the most 
spirited and poetical in literature, — "The stag 
at eve had drunk his fill." The same strength 
and the same weaknesses adorn and disfigure 
the novels. In that ill-written, ragged book, 
The Pirate, the figure of Cleveland — cast up by 
the sea on the resounding foreland of Dunross- 
ness — moving, with the blood on his hands and 
the Spanish words on his tongue, among the 
simple islanders — singing a serenade under the 



62 LEARNING TO WRITE 

window of his Shetland mistress — is conceived 
in the very highest manner of romantic inven- 
tion. The words of his song, "Through groves 
of palm," sung in such a scene and by such a 
lover, clench, as in a nutshell, the emphatic 
contrast upon which the tale is built. In Guy 
Mannering, again, every incident is delightful 
to the imagination; and the scene when Harry 
Bertram lands at Ellangowan is a model in- 
stance of romantic method. 

" 'I remember the tune well/ he says, 'though 
I cannot guess what should at present so strongly 
recall it to my memory/ He took his flageolet 
from his pocket and played a simple melody. 
Apparently the tune awoke the corresponding 
associations of a damsel. . . . She immediately 
took up the song — 

" 'Are these the links of Forth, she said; 
Or are they the crooks of Dee, 
Or the bonny woods of Warroch Head 
That I so fain would see?' 

" 'By heaven!' said Bertram, 'it is the very 
ballad.' " 

On this quotation two remarks fall to be 
made. First, as an instance of modern feeling 
for romance, this famous touch of the flageolet 
and the old song is selected by Miss Braddon 
for omission. Miss Braddon's idea of a story, 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 63 

like Mrs. Todgers's idea of a wooden leg, were 
something strange to have expounded. As a 
matter of personal experience, Meg's appear- 
ance to old Mr. Bertram on the road, the ruins 
of Derncleugh, the scene of the flageolet, and 
the Dominie's recognition of Harry, are the 
four strong notes that continue to ring in the 
mind after the book is laid aside. The second 
point is still more curious. The reader will 
observe a mark of excision in the passage as 
quoted by me. Well, here is how it runs in the 
original: "a damsel, who, close behind a fine 
spring about half-way down the descent, and 
which had once supplied the castle with water, 
was engaged in bleaching linen." A man who 
gave in such copy would be discharged from the 
staff of a daily paper. Scott has forgotten to 
prepare the reader for the presence of the 
"damsel"; he has forgotten to mention the 
spring and its relation to the ruin; and now, 
face to face with his omission, instead of trying 
back and starting fair, crams all this matter, 
tail foremost, into a single shambling sentence. 
It is not merely bad English, or bad style; it is 
abominably bad narrative besides. 

Certainly the contrast is remarkable; and it 
is one that throws a strong light upon the sub- 
ject of this paper. For here we have a man of 
the finest creative instinct touching with perfect 



64 LEARNING TO WRITE 

certainty and charm the romantic junctures of 
his story; and we find him utterly careless, 
almost, it would seem, incapable, in the tech- 
nical matter of style, and not only frequently 
weak, but frequently wrong in points of drama. 
In character parts, indeed, and particularly in 
the Scotch, he was delicate, strong and truthful; 
but the trite, obliterated features of too many 
of his heroes have already wearied two genera- 
tions of readers. At times his characters will 
speak with something far beyond propriety 
with a true heroic note; but on the next page 
they will be wading wearily forward with an 
ungrammatical and undramatic rigmarole of 
words. The man who could conceive and 
write the character of Elspeth of the Craig- 
burnfoot, as Scott has conceived and written 
it, had not only splendid romantic, but splen- 
did tragic gifts. How comes it, then, that he 
could so often fob us off with languid, inar- 
ticulate twaddle? 

It seems to me that the explanation is to be 
found in the very quality of his surprising 
merits. As his books are play to the reader, 
so were they play to him. He conjured up the 
romantic with delight, but he had hardly 
patience to describe it. He was a great day- 
dreamer, a seer of fit and beautiful and humor- 
ous visions, but hardly a great artist; hardly, 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 65 

in the manful sense, an artist at all. He pleased 
himself, and so he pleases us. Of the pleasures 
of his art he tasted fully; but of its toils and 
vigils and distresses never man knew less. A 
great romantic — an idle child. 



VI 

THE CRAFT IN TELLING A STORY 

From "A Humble Remonstrance" 

Whether a narrative be written in blank 
verse or the Spenserian stanza, in the long 
period of Gibbon or the chipped phrase of 
Charles Reade, the principles of the art of 
narrative must be equally observed. The choice 
of a noble and swelling style in prose affects 
the problem of narration in the same way, if 
not to the same degree, as the choice of mea- 
sured verse; for both imply a closer synthesis of 
events, a higher key of dialogue, and a more 
picked and stately strain of words. 

The art of narrative, in fact, is the same, 
whether it is applied to the selection and illus- 
tration of a real series of events or of an imag- 
inary series. BoswelPs Life of Johnson (a work 
of cunning and inimitable art) owes its success 
to the same technical manoeuvres as (let us 
say) Tom Jones: the clear conception of cer- 
tain characters of man, the choice and presen- 
tation of certain incidents out of a great num- 
ber that offered, and the invention (yes inven- 

66 



TELLING A STORY 67 

tion) and preservation of a certain key in 
dialogue. In which these things are done with 
the more art— in which with the greater air of 
nature — readers will differently judge. Bos- 
well's is, indeed, a very special case, and al- 
most a generic; but it is not only in Boswell, it 
is in every biography with any salt of life, it is 
in every history where events and men, rather 
than ideas, are presented — in Tacitus, in Car- 
lyle, in Michelet, in Macaulay — that the novel- 
ist will find many of his own methods most 
conspicuously and adroitly handled. He will 
find besides that he, who is free — who has the 
right to invent or steal a missing incident, who 
has the right, more precious still, of wholesale 
omission — is frequently defeated, and, with all 
his advantages, leaves a less strong impression 
of reality and passion. 

What, then, is the object, what the method, 
of an art, and what the source of its power? 
The whole secret is that no art does " compete 
with life." Man's one method, whether he 
reasons or creates, is to half-shut his eyes 
against the dazzle and confusion of reality. 
The arts, like arithmetic and geometry, turn 
away their eyes from the gross, coloured and 
mobile nature at our feet, and regard instead a 
certain figmentary abstraction. Geometry will 
tell us of a circle, a thing never seen in nature; 



68 LEARNING TO WRITE 

asked about a green circle or an iron circle, it 
lays its hand upon its mouth. So with the arts. 
Painting, ruefully comparing sunshine and flake- 
white, gives up truth of colour, as it had al- 
ready given up relief and movement; and in- 
stead of vying with nature, arranges a scheme 
of harmonious tints. Literature, above all in 
its most typical mood, the mood of narrative, 
similarly flees the direct challenge and pursues 
instead an independent and creative aim. So 
far as it imitates at all, it imitates not life but 
speech: not the facts of human destiny, but the 
emphasis and the suppressions with which the 
human actor tells of them. The real art that 
dealt with life directly was that of the first men 
who told their stories round the savage camp- 
fire. Our art is occupied, and bound to be oc- 
cupied, not so much in making stories true as 
in making them typical; not so much in captur- 
ing the lineaments of each fact, as in marshalling 
all of them towards a common end. For the 
welter of impressions, all forcible but all dis- 
creet, which life presents, it substitutes a cer- 
tain artificial series of impressions, all indeed 
most feebly represented, but all aiming at the 
same effect, all eloquent of the same idea, all 
chiming together like consonant notes in music 
or like the graduated tints in a good picture. 
From all its chapters, from all its pages, from 



TELLING A STORY 69 

all its sentences, the well-written novel echoes 
and re-echoes its one creative and controlling 
thought; to this must every incident and char- 
acter contribute; the style must have been 
pitched in unison with this; and if there is any- 
where a word that looks another way, the book 
would be stronger, clearer, and (I had almost 
said) fuller without it. Life is monstrous, in- 
finite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work 
of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-con- 
tained, rational, flowing and emasculate. Life 
imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate 
thunder; art catches the ear, among the far 
louder noises of experience, like an air artificially 
made by a discreet musician. A proposition of 
geometry does not compete with life; and a 
proposition of geometry is a fair and luminous 
parallel for a work of art. Both are reasonable, 
both untrue to the crude fact; both inhere in 
nature, neither represents it. The novel, 
which is a work of art, exists, not by its re- 
semblances to life, which are forced and ma- 
terial, as a shoe must still consist of leather, 
but by its immeasurable difference from life, 
which is designed and significant, and is both 
the method and the meaning of the work. 

The life of man is not the subject of novels, 
but the inexhaustible magazine from which 
subjects are to be selected; the name of these 



70 LEARNING TO WRITE 

is legion; and with each new subject the true 
artist will vary his method and change the 
point of attack. That which was in one case 
an excellence, will become a defect in another; 
what was the making of one book, will in the 
next be impertinent or dull. First each novel, 
and then each class of novels, exists by and for 
itself. I will take, for instance, three main 
classes, which are fairly distinct: first, the novel 
of adventure, which appeals to certain almost 
sensual and quite illogical tendencies in man; 
second, the novel of character, which appeals 
to our intellectual appreciation of man's foibles 
and mingled and inconstant motives; and third, 
the dramatic novel, which deals with the same 
stuff as the serious theatre, and appeals to our 
emotional nature and moral judgment. 

And first for the novel of adventure. The 
luxury, to most of us, is to lay by our judg- 
ment, to be submerged by the tale as by a bil- 
low, and only to awake, and begin to distin- 
guish and find fault, when the piece is over and 
the volume laid aside. There never was a 
child but has hunted gold, and been a pirate, 
and a military commander, and a bandit of the 
mountains; but has fought, and suffered ship- 
wreck and prison, and imbrued its little hands 
in gore, and gallantly retrieved the lost battle, 
and triumphantly protected innocence and 



TELLING A STORY 71 

beauty. Desire is a wonderful telescope, and 
Pisgah the best observatory. Now, while it is 
true that the author of the work in question 
has never, in the fleshly sense, gone questing 
after gold, it is probable that he has ardently 
desired and fondly imagined the details of such 
a life in youthful day-dreams; and the author, 
counting upon that, and well aware (cunning 
and low-minded man!) that this class of in- 
terest, having been frequently treated, finds a 
readily accessible and beaten road to the sym- 
pathies of the reader, addressed himself through- 
out to the building up and circumstantiation of 
this boyish dream. Character to the boy is a 
sealed book; for him, a pirate is a beard, a pair 
of wide trousers and a liberal complement of 
pistols. The author, for the sake of circum- 
stantiation and because he was himself more or 
less grown up, admitted character, within cer- 
tain limits, into his design; but only within cer- 
tain limits. Had the same puppets figured in a 
scheme of another sort, they had been drawn 
to very different purpose; for in this elementary 
novel of adventure, the characters need to be 
presented with but one class of qualities — the 
warlike and formidable. So as they appear 
insidious in deceit and fatal in the combat, they 
have served their end. Danger is the matter 
with which this class of novel deals; fear, the 



72 LEARNING TO WRITE 

passion with which it idly trifles; and the char- 
acters are portrayed only so far as they realise 
the sense of danger and provoke the sympathy 
of fear. To add more traits, to be too clever, 
to start the hare of moral or intellectual inter- 
est while we are running the fox of material 
interest, is not to enrich but to stultify your 
tale. The stupid reader will only be offended, 
and the clever reader lose the scent. 

The novel of character has this difference 
from all others: that it requires no coherency 
of plot, and for this reason, as in the case of 
Gil Bias, it is sometimes called the novel of 
adventure. It turns on the humours of the 
persons represented; these are, to be sure, em- 
bodied in incidents, but the incidents them- 
selves, being tributary, need not march in a 
progression; and the characters may be stati- 
cally shown. As they enter, so they may go 
out; they must be consistent, but they need not 
grow. Here Mr. James * will recognise the note 
of much of his own work: he treats, for the 
most part, the statics of character, studying it 
at rest or only gently moved; and, with his 
usual delicate and just artistic instinct, he 
avoids those stronger passions which would de- 
form the attitudes he loves to study, and change 
his sitters from the humourists of ordinary life 
* Henry James, the novelist. 



TELLING A STORY 73 

to the brute forces and bare types of more 
emotional moments. In his recent Author of 
Beltraffio, so just in conception, so nimble and 
neat in workmanship, strong passion is indeed 
employed; but observe that it is not displayed. 
Even in the heroine the working of the passion 
is suppressed; and the great struggle, the true 
tragedy, the scene-d-faire, passes unseen be- 
hind the panels of a locked door. The delec- 
table invention of the young visitor is intro- 
duced, consciously or not, to this end: that Mr. 
James, true to his method, might avoid the 
scene of passion. I trust no reader will suppose 
me guilty of undervaluing this little master- 
piece. I mean merely that it belongs to one 
marked class of novel, and that it would have 
been very differently conceived and treated 
had it belonged to that other marked class, of 
which I now proceed to speak. 

I take pleasure in calling the dramatic novel 
by that name, because it enables me to point 
out by the way a strange and peculiarly Eng- 
lish misconception. It is sometimes supposed 
that the drama consists of incident. It con- 
sists of passion, which gives the actor his op- 
portunity; and that passion must progressively 
increase, or the actor, as the piece proceeded, 
would be unable to carry the audience from a 
lower to a higher pitch of interest and emotion. 



74 LEARNING TO WRITE 

A good serious play must therefore be founded 
on one of the passionate cruces of life, where 
duty and inclination come nobly to the grapple; 
and the same is true of what I call, for that 
reason, the dramatic novel. I will instance a 
few worthy specimens, all of our own day and 
language: Meredith's Rhoda Fleming, that won- 
derful and painful book, long out of print,* 
and hunted for at book-stalls like an Aldine; 
Hardy's Pair of Blue Eyes; and two of Charles 
Reade's, Griffith Gaunt and The Double Marriage, 
originally called White Lies, and founded (by 
an accident quaintly favourable to my nomen- 
clature) on a play by Maquet, the partner of 
the great Dumas. In this kind of novel the 
closed door of The Author of Beltraffio must be 
broken open; passion must appear upon the 
scene and utter its last word; passion is the 
be-all and the end-all, the plot and the solu- 
tion, the protagonist and the deus ex machina 
in one. The characters may come anyhow 
upon the stage: we do not care; the point is, 
that, before they leave it, they shall become 
transfigured and raised out of themselves by 
passion. It may be part of the design to draw 
them with detail; to depict a full-length char- 
acter, and then behold it melt and change in 
the furnace of emotion. But there is no obliga- 
* Now no longer so, thank heaven ! 



TELLING A STORY 75 

tion of the sort; nice portraiture is not required; 
and we are content to accept mere abstract 
types, so they be strongly and sincerely moved. 
A novel of this class may be even great, and 
yet contain no individual figure; it may be 
great, because it displays the workings of the 
perturbed heart and the impersonal utterance 
of passion; and with an artist of the second 
class it is, indeed, even more likely to be great, 
when the issue has thus been narrowed and the 
whole force of the writer's mind directed to 
passion alone. Cleverness again, which has its 
fair field in the novel of character, is debarred 
all entry upon this more solemn theatre. A 
far-fetched motive, an ingenious evasion of the 
issue, a witty instead of a passionate turn, 
offend us like an insincerity. All should be 
plain, all straightforward to the end. Hence 
it is that, in Rhoda Fleming, Mrs. Lovel raises 
such resentment in the reader; her motives are 
too flimsy, her ways are too equivocal, for the 
weight and strength of her surroundings. 
Hence the hot indignation of the reader when 
Balzac, after having begun the Duchesse de 
Langeais in terms of strong if somewhat swollen 
passion, cuts the knot by the derangement of 
the hero's clock. Such personages and inci- 
dents belong to the novel of character; they 
are out of place in the high society of the pas- 



76 LEARNING TO WRITE 

sions; when the passions are introduced in art 
at their full height, we look to see them, not 
baffled and impotently striving, as in life, but 
towering above circumstance and acting sub- 
stitutes for fate. 

But the point is not merely to amuse the 
public, but to offer helpful advice to the young 
writer. And the young writer will not so much 
be helped by genial pictures of what an art may 
aspire to at its highest, as by a true idea of 
what it must be on the lowest terms. The 
best that we can say to him is this: Let him 
choose a motive, whether of character or pas- 
sion; carefully construct his plot so that every 
incident is an illustration of the motive, and 
every property employed shall bear to it a 
near relation of congruity or contrast; avoid a 
sub-plot, unless, as sometimes in Shakespeare, 
the sub-plot be a reversion or complement of 
the main intrigue; suffer not his style to flag 
below the level of the argument; pitch the key 
of conversation, not with any thought of how 
men talk in parlours, but with a single eye to 
the degree of passion he may be called on to 
express; and allow neither himself in the nar- 
rative nor any character in the course of the 
dialogue, to utter one sentence that is not part 
and parcel of the business of the story or the 
discussion of the problem involved. Let him 



TELLING A STORY 77 

not regret if this shortens his book; it will be 
better so; for to add irrelevant matter is not to 
lengthen but to bury. Let him not mind if he 
miss a thousand qualities, so that he keeps un- 
flaggingly in pursuit of the one he has chosen. 
Let him not care particularly if he miss the 
tone of conversation, the pungent material de- 
tail of the day's manners, the reproduction of 
the atmosphere and the environment. These 
elements are not essential: a novel may be 
excellent, and yet have none of them; a passion 
or a character is so much the better depicted as 
it rises clearer from material circumstance. In 
this age of the particular, let him remember the 
ages of the abstract, the great books of the past, 
the brave men that lived before Shakespeare 
and before Balzac. And as the root of the 
whole matter, let him bear in mind that his 
novel is not a transcript of life, to be judged by 
its exactitude; but a simplification of some side 
or point of life, to stand or fall by its significant 
simplicity. For although, in great men, work- 
ing upon great motives, what we observe and 
admire is often their complexity, yet under- 
neath appearances the truth remains unchanged: 
that simplification was their method, and that 
simplicity is their excellence. 



VII 
MISCELLANEOUS OBSERVATIONS 

I 

Notes for the Student of Any Art 

i. Keep an intelligent eye upon all the others. 
It is only by doing so that you come to see what 
Art is: Art is the end common to them all, it 
is none of the points by which they differ. 

2. In this age beware of realism. 

3. In your own art, bow your head over tech- 
nique. Think of technique when you rise and 
when you go to bed. Forget purposes in the 
meanwhile; get to love technical processes; to 
glory in technical successes; get to see the world 
entirely through technical spectacles, to see it 
entirely in terms of what you can do. Then 
when you have anything to say, the language 
will be apt and copious. 

4. See the good in other people's work; it 
will never be yours. See the bad in your own, 
and don't cry about it; it will be there always. 
Try to use your faults; at any rate use your 
knowledge of them, and don't run your head 
against stone walls. Art is not like theology; 

78 



OBSERVATIONS 79 

nothing is forced. You have not to represent 
the world. You have to represent only what 
you can represent with pleasure and effect, 
and the only way to find out what that is is 
by technical exercise. 

— Letter to Trevor Haddon. 

II 

Craftsmanship in Literature 

Seriously, from the dearth of information 
and thoughtful interest in the art of literature, 
those who try to practise it with any deliberate 
purpose run the risk of finding no fit audience. 
People suppose it is "the stuff" that interests 
them; they think, for instance, that the 
prodigious fine thoughts and sentiments in 
Shakespeare impress by their own weight, not 
understanding that the unpolished diamond is 
but a stone. They think that striking situa- 
tions, or good dialogue, are got by studying 
life; they will not rise to understand that they 
are prepared by deliberate artifice and set off 
by painful suppressions. 

— Letter to Henry James. 

This purely artistic society is excellent for 
the young artist. The lads are mostly fools; 
they hold the latest orthodoxy in its crudeness; 



80 LEARNING TO WRITE 

they are at that stage of education, for the most 
part, when a man is too much occupied with 
style to be aware of the necessity for any mat- 
ter; and this, above all for the Englishman, is 
excellent. To work grossly at the trade, to 
forget sentiment, to think of his material and 
nothing else, is, for a while at least, the king's 
highway of progress. Here, in England, too 
many painters and writers dwell dispersed, un- 
shielded, among the intelligent bourgeois. 
These, when they are not merely indifferent, 
prate to him about the lofty aims and moral 
influence of art. And this is the lad's ruin. 
For art is, first of all and last of all, a trade. 
The love of words and not a desire to publish 
new discoveries, the love of form and not a 
novel reading of historical events, mark the 
vocation of the writer and the painter. The 
arabesque, properly speaking, and even in 
literature, is the first fancy of the artist; he 
first plays with his material as a child plays 
with a kaleidoscope; and he is already in a 
second stage when he begins to use his pretty 
counters for the end of representation. In 
that, he must pause long and toil faithfully; 
that is his apprenticeship; and it is only the 
few who will really grow beyond it, and go for- 
ward, fully equipped, to do the business of 
real art — to give life to abstractions and sig- 



OBSERVATIONS 81 

nificance and charm to facts. In the mean- 
while, let him dwell much among his fellow- 
craftsmen. They alone can take a serious in- 
terest in the childish tasks and pitiful successes 
of these years. They alone can behold with 
equanimity this fingering of the dumb key- 
board, this polishing of empty sentences, this 
dull and literal painting of dull and insignificant 
subjects. Outsiders will spur him on. They 
will say, "Why do you not write a great book? 
paint a great picture?" If his guardian angel 
fail him, they may even persuade him to the 
attempt, and, ten to one, his hand is coarsened 
and his style falsified for life. 

And this brings me to a warning. The life of 
the apprentice to any art is both unstrained 
and pleasing; it is strewn with small successes 
in the midst of a career of failure, patiently 
supported; the heaviest scholar is conscious of 
a certain progress; and if he come not appreci- 
ably nearer to the art of Shakespeare, grows 
letter-perfect in the domain of A-B, ab. But 
the time comes when a man should cease 
prelusory gymnastic, stand up, put a violence 
upon his will, and for better or worse, begin the 
business of creation. This evil day there is a 
tendency continually to postpone. 

— Fontainebleau. 



82 LEARNING TO WRITE 

III 

Importance of Style in Writing 

It was by his style, and not by his matter, 
that Burns affected Wordsworth and the 
world. There is, indeed, only one merit worth 
considering in a man of letters — that he should 
write well; and only one damning fault — that 
he should write ill. We are little the better for 
the reflections of the sailor's parrot in the 
story. And so, if Burns helped to change the 
course of literary history, it was by his frank, 
direct, and masterly utterance, and not by his 
homely choice of subjects. That was imposed 
upon him, not chosen upon a principle. He 
wrote from his own experience, because it was 
his nature so to do, and the tradition of the 
school from which he proceeded was fortunately 
not opposed to homely subjects. But to these 
homely subjects he communicated the rich 
commentary of his nature; they were all steeped 
in Burns; and they interest us not in them- 
selves, but because they have been passed 
through the spirit of so genuine and vigorous a 
man. Such is the stamp of living literature; 
and there was never any more alive than that 
of Burns. 

—Some Aspects of Robert Burns. 



OBSERVATIONS 83 

IV 

Danger of Realism 

Beware of realism; it is the devil; 't is one 
of the means of art, and now they make it the 
end ! And such is the farce of the age in which 
a man lives, that we all, even those of us who 
most detest it, sin by realism. 

— Letter to Trevor Haddon. 

V 

Difficulty for Beginners 

Anybody can write a short story — a bad one, 
I mean — who has industry and paper and time 
enough; but not everyone may hope to write 
even a bad novel. It is the length that kills. 
The accepted novelist may take his novel up 
and put it down, spend days upon it in vain, 
and write not any more than he makes haste to 
blot. Not so the beginner. Human nature 
has certain rights; instinct — the instinct of 
self-preservation — forbids that any man (cheered 
and supported by the consciousness of no previ- 
ous victory) should endure the miseries of un- 
successful literary toil beyond a period to be 
measured in weeks. There must be something 
for hope to feed upon. The beginner must have 



84 LEARNING TO WRITE 

a slant of wind, a lucky vein must be running, 
he must be in one of those hours when the words 
come and the phrases balance of themselves — 
even to begin. And having begun, what a dread 
looking forward is that until the book shall be 
accomplished ! For so long a time the slant is 
to continue unchanged, the vein to keep run- 
ning; for so long a time you must hold at com- 
mand the same quality of style; for so long a 
time your puppets are to be always vital, al- 
ways consistent, always vigorous. I remember 
I used to look, in those days, upon every three- 
volume novel with a sort of veneration, as a 
feat — not possibly of literature — but at least of 
physical and moral endurance and the courage 
of Ajax. 

— My First Book — "Treasure Island." 

VI 

Writing Without Effort 

When truth flows from a man, fittingly 
clothed in style and without conscious effort, it 
is because the effort has been made and the 
work practically completed before he sat down 
to write.- It is only out of fulness of thinking 
that expression drops perfect like a ripe fruit; 
and when Thoreau wrote so nonchalantly at 
his desk, it was because he had been vigor- 



OBSERVATIONS 85 

ously active during his walk. For neither clear- 
ness, compression, nor beauty of language, 
come to any living creature till after a busy 
and a prolonged acquaintance with the subject 
on hand. Easy writers are those who, like 
Walter Scott, choose to remain contented with 
a less degree of perfection than is legitimately 
within the compass of their powers. We hear 
of Shakespeare and his clean manuscript; but 
in face of the evidence of the style itself and of 
the various editions of Hamlet, this merely 
proves that Messrs. Hemming and Condell were 
unacquainted with the common enough phenom- 
enon called a fair copy. He who would recast 
a tragedy already given to the world must fre- 
quently and earnestly have revised details in 
the study. Thoreau himself, and in spite of 
his protestations, is an instance of even ex- 
treme research in one direction; and his effort 
after heroic utterance is proved not only by the 
occasional finish, but by the determined exag- 
geration of his style. "I trust you realize what 
an exaggerator I am — that I lay myself out to 
exaggerate," he writes. And again, hinting at 
the explanation: "Who that has heard a strain 
of music feared lest he should speak extrava- 
gantly any more forever ? " And yet once more, 
in his essay on Carlyle, and this time with his 
meaning well in hand: "No truth, we think, 



86 LEARNING TO WRITE 

was ever expressed but with this sort of em- 
phasis, that for the time there seemed to be no 
other.'' Thus Thoreau was an exaggerative 
and a parabolical writer, not because he loved 
the literature of the East, but from a desire that 
people should understand and realise what he 
was writing. He was near the truth upon the 
general question; but in his own particular 
method, it appears to me, he wandered. Litera- 
ture is not less a conventional art than painting 
or sculpture; and it is the least striking, as it 
is the most comprehensive of the three. To 
hear a strain of music, to see a beautiful woman, 
a river, a great city, or a starry night, is to 
make a man despair of his Lilliputian arts in 
language. Now, to gain that emphasis which 
seems denied to us by the very nature of the 
medium, the proper method of literature is by 
selection, which is a kind of negative exaggera- 
tion. It is the right of the literary artist, as 
Thoreau was on the point of seeing, to leave 
out whatever does not suit his purpose. Thus 
we extract the pure gold; and thus the well- 
written story of a noble life becomes, by its 
very omissions, more thrilling to the reader. 
But to go beyond this, like Thoreau, and to 
exaggerate directly, is to leave the saner clas- 
sical tradition, and to put the reader on his 
guard. And when you write the whole for the 
half ; you do not express your thought more 



OBSERVATIONS 87 

forcibly, but only express a different thought 
which is not yours. 

— Henry David Thoreau. 

VII 

Subjects for Poems 

The contemporaries of Burns were surprised 
that he should visit so many celebrated moun- 
tains and waterfalls, and not seize the oppor- 
tunity to make a poem. Indeed, it is not for 
those who have a true command of the art of 
words, but for peddling, professional amateurs, 
that these pointed occasions are most useful 
and inspiring. As those who speak French im- 
perfectly are glad to dwell on any topic they 
may have talked upon or heard others talk 
upon before, because they know appropriate 
words for it in French, so the dabbler in verse 
rejoices to behold a waterfall because he has 
learned the sentiment and knows appropriate 
words for it in poetry. 

— Some Aspects of Robert Burns. 

VIII 

Stevenson's Method of Writing 

I used to write as slow as judgment; now I 
write rather fast; but I am still "a slow study," 
and sit a long while silent on my eggs. Uncon- 



88 LEARNING TO WRITE 

scious thought, there is the only method: 
macerate your subject, let it boil slow, then 
take the lid off and look in — and there your 
stuff is, good or bad. 

— Letter to Craibe Angus. 

IX 

Holding the Reader's Attention 

Familiarity has a cunning disenchantment; 
in a day or two she can steal all beauty from the 
mountain- tops; and the most startling words 
begin to fall dead upon the ear after several rep- 
etitions. If you see a thing too often, you no 
longer see it; if you hear a thing too often, you 
no longer hear it. Our attention requires to 
be surprised; and to carry a fort by assault, or 
to gain a thoughtful hearing from the ruck of 
mankind, are feats of about an equal difficulty 
and must be tried by not dissimilar means. 

— Lay Morals. 
X 

Words 

Language is but a poor bull's-eye lantern 
wherewith to show off the vast cathedral of 
the world; and yet a particular thing once said 
in words is so definite and memorable, that it 
makes us forget the absence of the many which 
remain unexpressed; like a bright window in a 



OBSERVATIONS 89 

distant view, which dazzles and confuses our 
sight of its surroundings. There are not words 
enough in all Shakespeare to express the merest 
fraction of a man's experience in an hour. The 
speed of the eyesight and the hearing, and the 
continual industry of the mind, produce, in 
ten minutes, what it would require a laborious 
volume to shadow forth by comparisons and 
roundabout approaches. If verbal logic were 
sufficient, life would be as plain sailing as a 
piece of Euclid. But, as a matter of fact, we 
make a travesty of the simplest process of 
thought when we put it into words; for the 
words are all coloured and forsworn, apply in- 
accurately, and bring with them, from former 
uses, ideas of praise and blame that have noth- 
ing to do with the question in hand. So we 
must always see to it nearly, that we judge by 
the realities of life and not by the partial terms 
that represent them in man's speech; and at 
times of choice, we must leave words upon one 
side, and act upon those brute convictions, 
unexpressed and perhaps inexpressible, which 
cannot be flourished in an argument, but which 
are truly the sum and fruit of our experience. 
Words are for communication, not for judgment. 
This is what every thoughtful man knows for 
himself, for only fools and silly schoolmasters 
push definitions over far into the domain of 
conduct; and the majority of women, not learned 



go LEARNING TO WRITE 

in these scholastic refinements, live all-of-a-piece 
and unconsciously, as a tree grows, without car- 
ing to put a name upon their acts or motives. 

— Walt Whitman. 

XI 

Effectiveness of Profuse Description 

[Speaking of "Notre Dame de Paris" \ 
Old Paris lives for us with newness of life: 
we have ever before our eyes the city cut into 
three by the two arms of the river, the boat- 
shaped island "moored " by five bridges to 
the different shores, and the two unequal 
towns on either hand. We forget all that 
enumeration of palaces and churches and con- 
vents which occupies so many pages of admi- 
rable description, and the thoughtless reader 
might be inclined to conclude from this, that 
they were pages thrown away; but this is not 
so: we forget, indeed, the details, as we forget 
or do not see the different layers of paint on 
a completed picture; but the thing desired has 
been accomplished, and we carry away with us 
a sense of the "Gothic profile" of the city, of 
the "surprising forest of pinnacles and towers 
and belfries," and we know not what of rich 
and intricate and quaint. 

— Victor Hugo's Romances. 



OBSERVATIONS 91 

XII 

Use of Recollections in Writing 

When we are looking at a landscape we think 
ourselves pleased; but it is only when it comes 
back upon us by the fire o' nights that we can 
disentangle the main charm from the thick of 
particulars. It is just so with what is lately 
past. It is too much loaded with detail to be 
distinct; and the canvas is too large for the eye 
to encompass. But this is no more the case 
when our recollections have been strained long 
enough through the hour-glass of time; when 
they have been the burthen of so much thought, 
the charm and comfort of so many a vigil. 
All that is worthless has been sieved and sifted 
out of them. Nothing remains but the bright- 
est lights and the darkest shadows. When we 
see a mountain country near at hand, the spurs 
and haunches crowd up in eager rivalry, and 
the whole range seems to have shrugged its 
shoulders to its ears, till we cannot tell the 
higher from the lower: but when we are far 
off, these lesser prominences are melted back 
into the bosom of the rest, or have set behind 
the round horizon of the plain, and the highest 
peaks stand forth in lone and sovereign dig- 
nity against the sky. It is just the same with 



92 LEARNING TO WRITE 

our recollections. We require to draw back 
and shade our eyes before the picture dawns 
upon us in full breadth and outline. Late 
years are still in limbo to us; but the more dis- 
tant past is all that we possess in life, the corn 
already harvested and stored for ever in the 
grange of memory. The doings of to-day at 
some future time will gain the required offing; 
I shall learn to love the things of my adoles- 
cence, as Hazlitt loved them, and as I love al- 
ready the recollections of my childhood. They 
will gather interest with every year. They will 
ripen in forgotten corners of my memory; and 
some day I shall waken and find them vested 
with new glory and new pleasantness. 

— A Retrospect. 

Very much as a painter half closes his eyes 
so that some salient unity may disengage itself 
from among the crowd of details, and what he 
sees may thus form itself into a whole; very 
much on the same principle, I may say, I al- 
low a considerable lapse of time to intervene 
between any of my little journeyings and the 
attempt to chronicle them. I cannot describe 
a thing that is before me at the moment, or 
that has been before me only a very little while 
before; I must allow my recollections to get 
thoroughly strained free from all chaff till 



OBSERVATIONS 93 

nothing be. except the pure gold; allow my mem- 
ory to choose out what is truly memorable by a 
process of natural selection; and I piously be- 
lieve that in this way I ensure the Survival of 
the Fittest. If I make notes for future use, or 
if I am obliged to write letters during the course 
of my little excursion, I so interfere with the 
process that I can never again find out what is 
worthy of being preserved, or what should be 
given in full length, what in torso, or what 
merely in profile. This process of incubation 
may be unreasonably prolonged. 

— Cockermouth and Keswick. 



Those who try to be artists use, time after 
time, the matter of their recollections, setting 
and resetting little coloured memories of men 
and scenes, rigging up (it may be) some es- 
pecial friend in the attire of a buccaneer, and 
decreeing armies to manoeuvre, or murder to 
be done, on the playground of their youth. 
But the memories are a fairy gift which can- 
not be worn out in using. After a dozen ser- 
vices in various tales, the little sunbright pic- 
tures of the past still shine in the mind's eye 
with not a lineament defaced, not a tint im- 
paired. 

— Memoirs of an Islet. 



94 LEARNING TO WRITE 

XIII 

Building a Character for a Story 

And then I had an idea for John Silver from 
which I promised myself funds of entertainment: 
to take an admired friend of mine (whom the 
reader very likely knows and admires as much 
as I do), to deprive him of all his finer quali- 
ties and higher graces of temperament, to leave 
him with nothing but his strength, his courage, 
his quickness, and his magnificent geniality, 
and to try to express these in terms of the cul- 
ture of a raw tarpaulin. Such psychical sur- 
gery is, I think, a common way of "making char- 
acter"; perhaps it is, indeed, the only way. 
We can put in the quaint figure that spoke a 
hundred words with us yesterday by the way- 
side; but do we know him? Our friend, with 
his infinite variety and flexibility, we know — 
but can we put him in ? Upon the first we must 
engraft secondary and imaginary qualities, 
possibly all wrong; from the second, knife in 
hand, we must cut away and deduct the need- 
less arborescence of his nature; but the trunk 
and the few branches that remain we may at 
least be fairly sure of. 

— My First Book — "Treasure Island" 



OBSERVATIONS 95 

XIV 

How We Understand Other People 

We can only know others by ourselves. The 
artistic temperament (a plague on the expres- 
sion !) does not make us different from our fel- 
low-men, or it would make us incapable of 
writing novels; and the average man (a murrain 
on the word!) is just like you and me, or he 
would not be average. It was Whitman who 
stamped a kind of Birmingham sacredness upon 
the latter phrase; but Whitman knew very 
well, and showed very nobly, that the average 
man was full of joys and full of a poetry of his 
own. And this harping on life's dulness and 
man's meanness is a loud profession of incom- 
petence; it is one of two things: the cry of the 
blind eye, / cannot see, or the complaint of the 
dumb tongue, / cannot utter. To draw a life 
without delights is to prove I have not realised 
it. To picture a man without some sort of 
poetry — well, it goes near to prove my case, for 
it shows an author may have little enough. 
— The Lantern Bearers. 



96 LEARNING TO WRITE 

XV 

Writing Character Studies 

To write with authority about another man, 
we must have fellow-feeling and some common 
ground of experience with our subject. We 
may praise or blame according as we find him 
related to us by the best or worst in ourselves; 
but it is only in virtue of some relationship that 
we can be his judges, even to condemn. Feel- 
ings which we share and understand enter for 
us into the tissue of the man's character; those 
to which we are strangers in our own experience 
we are inclined to regard as blots, exceptions, 
inconsistencies, and excursions of the diabolic; 
we conceive them with repugnance, explain 
them with difficulty, and raise our hands to 
heaven in wonder when we find them in con- 
junction with talents that we respect or virtues 
that we admire. David, king of Israel, would 
pass a sounder judgment on a man than either 
Nathaniel or David Hume. To take a man's 
work piecemeal, except with the design of ele- 
gant extracts, is the way to avoid, and not to 
perform, the critic's duty. If you are so sensibly 
pained by the misconduct of your subject, and 
so paternally delighted with his virtues, you 



OBSERVATIONS 97 

will always be an excellent gentleman, but a 
somewhat questionable biographer. 

— Some Aspects of Robert Burns. 

The writer of short studies, having to con- 
dense in a few pages the events of a whole life- 
time, and the effect on his own mind of many 
various volumes, is bound, above all things, to 
make that condensation logical and striking. 
For the only justification of his writing at all is 
that he shall present a brief, reasoned, and 
memorable view. By the necessity of the case, 
all the more neutral circumstances are omitted 
from his narrative; and that of itself, by the 
negative exaggeration of which I have spoken 
in the text, lends to the matter in hand a cer- 
tain false and specious glitter. By the neces- 
sity of the case, again, he is forced to view his 
subject throughout in a particular illumination, 
like a studio artifice. Like Hales with Pepys, 
he must nearly break his sitter's neck to get 
the proper shadows on the portrait. It is from 
one side only that he has time to represent his 
subject. The side selected will either be the 
one most striking to himself, or the one most 
obscured by controversy; and in both cases 
that will be the one most liable to strained and 
sophisticated reading. In a biography, this and 



98 LEARNING TO WRITE 

that is displayed; the hero is seen at home, play- 
ing the flute; the different tendencies of his 
work come, one after another, into notice; and 
thus something like a true, general impression 
of the subject may at last be struck. But in 
the short study, the writer, having seized his 
" point of view," must keep his eye steadily to 
that. He seeks, perhaps, rather to differentiate 
than truly to characterise. The proportions of 
the sitter must be sacrificed to the proportions 
of the portrait; the lights are heightened, the 
shadows overcharged; the chosen expression, 
continually forced, may degenerate at length 
into a grimace; and we have at best something 
of a caricature, at worst a calumny. Hence, if 
they be readable at all, and hang together by 
their own ends, the peculiar convincing force of 
these brief representations. They take so lit- 
tle a while to read, and yet in that little while 
the subject is so repeatedly introduced in the 
same light and with the same expression, that, 
by sheer force of repetition, that view is imposed 
upon the reader. The two English masters of 
the style, Macaulay and Carlyle, largely exem- 
plify its dangers. Carlyle, indeed, had so much 
more depth and knowledge of the heart, his 
portraits of mankind are felt and rendered with 
so much more poetic comprehension, and he, 



OBSERVATIONS 99 

like his favourite Ram Dass, had a fire in his 
belly so much more hotly burning than the 
patent reading lamp by which Macaulay studied, 
that it seems at first sight hardly fair to bracket 
them together. But the "point of view" was 
imposed by Carlyle on the men he judged of in 
his writings with an austerity not only cruel but 
almost stupid. They are too often broken out- 
right on the Procrustean bed; they are probably 
always disfigured. The rhetorical artifice of 
Macaulay is easily spied; it will take longer to 
appreciate the moral bias of Carlyle. So with 
all writers who insist on forcing some significance 
from all that comes before them; and the writer 
of short studies is bound, by the necessity of the 
case, to write entirely in that spirit. What he 
cannot vivify he should omit. . . . 

Short studies are, or should be, things woven 
like a carpet, from which it is impossible to de- 
tach a strand. What is perverted has its place 
there forever, as a part of the technical means 
by which what is right has been presented. It 
is only possible to write another study, and 
then, with a new "point of view," would follow 
new perversions and perhaps a fresh caricature. 
This is a case of a second difficulty which lies 
continually before the writer of critical studies: 
that he has to mediate between the author whom 



ioo LEARNING TO WRITE 

he loves and the public who are certainly in- 
different and frequently averse. Where you see 
no good, silence is best. 

— Preface "Fatniliar Studies." 

XVI 

A Trick of Heroines 

Readers cannot fail to have remarked that 
what an author tells us of the beauty or the 
charm of his creatures goes for nought; that we 
know instantly better; that the heroine cannot 
open her mouth but what, all in a moment, the 
fine phrases of preparation fall from round her 
like the robes from Cinderella, and she stands 
before us, self-betrayed, as a poor, ugly, sickly 
wench, or perhaps a strapping market-woman. 
Authors, at least, know it well; a heroine will 
too often start the trick of "getting ugly"; and 
no disease is more difficult to cure. I said au- 
thors; but indeed I had a side eye to one author 
in particular, with whose works I am very well 
acquainted, though I cannot read them, and 
who has spent many vigils in this cause, sitting 
beside his ailing puppets and (like a magician) 
wearying his art to restore them to youth and 
beauty, 

— "A Gossip on Dumas Novels" 



OBSERVATIONS 101 



XVII 

Difficulty and Advantage of 
Collaboration 

The great difficulty of collaboration is that 
you can't explain what you mean. I know what 
kind of effect I mean a character to give — what 
kind of tache he is to make; but how am I to 
tell my collaborator in words? Hence it was 
necessary to say, "Make him So-and-so"; and 
this was all right for Nares and Pinkerton and 
Loudon Dodd, whom we both knew, but for 
Bellairs, for instance — a man with whom I 
passed ten minutes fifteen years ago — what 
was I to say? and what could Lloyd do? I, 
as a personal artist, can begin a character with 
only a haze in my head, but how if I have to 
translate the haze into words before I begin? 
In our manner of collaboration (which I think 
the only possible — I mean that of one person 
being responsible, and giving the coup de ponce 
to every part of the work) I was spared the 
obviously hopeless business of trying to explain 
to my collaborator what style I wished a pass- 
age to be treated in. These are the times that 
illustrate to a man the inadequacy of spoken 
language. Now — to be just to written Ian- 



102 LEARNING TO WRITE 

guage — I can (or could) find a language for my 
every mood, but how could I tell any one be- 
forehand what this effect was to be, which it 
would take every art that I possessed, and 
hours and hours of deliberate, labour and selec- 
tion and rejection, to produce? These are the 
impossibilities of collaboration. Its immedi- 
ate advantage is to focus two minds together 
on the stuff, and to produce in consequence an 
extraordinary greater richness of purview, con- 
sideration, and invention. 

— Letter to R. A. M. Stevenson. 

XVIII 

The Importance of Narrative in 
Literature 

The true business of literature is with nar- 
rative; in reasoned narrative, and there alone, 
that art enjoys all its advantages, and suffers 
least from its defects. Dry precept and dis- 
embodied disquisition, as they can only be read 
with an effort of abstraction, can never convey 
a perfectly complete or a perfectly natural im- 
pression. Truth, even in literature, must be 
clothed with flesh and blood, or it cannot tell 
its whole story to the reader. Hence the effect 
of anecdote on simple minds; and hence good 
biographies and works of high, imaginative art, 



OBSERVATIONS 103 

are not only far more entertaining, but far more 
edifying, than books of theory or precept. 

— Henry David Thoreau. 

XIX 

Subject for Literature 

My theory is that literature must always be 
most at home in treating movement and change; 
hence I look for them. 

— Letter to Wm. Archer. 

XX 

Spirit in Literature 

As I live, I feel more and more that literature 
should be cheerful and brave-spirited, even if it 
cannot be made beautiful and pious and heroic. 
We wish it to be a green place; the Waverley 
Novels are better to re-read than the over-true 
Life, fine as dear Sir Walter was. The Bible, 
in most parts, is a cheerful book; it is our lit- 
tle piping theologies, tracts, and sermons that 
are dull and dowie; and even the Shorter 
Catechism, which is scarcely a work of conso- 
lation, opens with the best and shortest and 
completest sermon ever written — upon Man's 

— Letter to Mr. Dick. 



104 LEARNING TO WRITE 

XXI 

What Interests Us in Robinson Crusoe 

Emerson mentions having once remarked to 
Thoreau: "Who would not like to write some- 
thing which all can read, like Robinson Crusoe? 
and who does not see with regret that his page 
is not solid with a right materialistic treatment 
which delights everybody ?" I must say in 
passing that it is not the right materialistic 
treatment which delights the world in Robinson, 
but the romantic and philosophic interest of 

— Henry David Thoreau. 



XXII 

Books We Re-read 

The books that we re-read the oftenest are 
not always those that we admire the most; we 
choose and we revisit them for many and vari- 
ous reasons, as we choose and revisit human 
friends. 



-"A Gossip on Dumas Novels" 



OBSERVATIONS 105 

XXIII 

When the Imagination Grows Stale 

He who indulges habitually in the intoxicat- 
ing pleasures of imagination, for the very rea- 
son that he reaps a greater pleasure than others, 
must resign himself to a keener pain, a more 
intolerable and utter prostration. It is quite 
possible, and even comparatively easy, so to 
enfold oneself in pleasant fancies that the real- 
ities of life may seem but as the white snow- 
shower in the street, that only gives a relish to 
the swept hearth and lively fire within. By 
such means I have forgotten hunger, I have 
sometimes eased pain, and I have invariably 
changed into the most pleasant hours of the 
day those very vacant and idle seasons which 
would otherwise have hung most heavily upon 
my hand. But all this is attained by the undue 
prominence of purely imaginative joys, and 
consequently the weakening and almost the 
destruction of reality. This is buying at too 
great a price. There are seasons when the 
imagination becomes somehow tranced and sur- 
feited, as it is with me this morning; and then 
upon what can we fall back ? The very faculty 
that we have fostered and trusted has failed 
us in the hour of trial; and we have so blunted 



io6 LEARNING TO WRITE 

and enfeebled our appetite for the others that 
they are subjectively dead to us. It is just as 
though a farmer should plant all his fields in 
potatoes, instead of varying them with grain 
and pasture; and so, when the disease comes, 
lose all his harvest, while his neighbours, per- 
haps, may balance the profit and the loss. Do 
not suppose that I am exaggerating when I talk 
about all pleasures seeming stale. To me, at 
least, the edge of almost everything is put on by 
imagination; and even nature, in these days 
when the fancy is drugged and useless, wants 
half the charm it has in better moments. I can 
no longer see satyrs in the thicket, or picture a 
highwayman riding down the lane. The fiat 
of indifference has gone forth: I am vacant, 
unprofitable: a leaf on a river with no volition 
and no aim: a mental drunkard the morning 
after an intellectual debauch. Yes, I have a 
more subtle opium in my own mind than any 
apothecary's drug; but it has a sting of its own, 
and leaves me as flat and helpless as does the 

— A Retrospect. 

As for my damned literature, God knows 
what a business it is, grinding along without a 
scrap of inspiration or a note of style. But it 
has to be ground, and the mill grinds exceed- 



OBSERVATIONS 107 

ing slowly though not particularly small. The 

last two chapters have taken me considerably 

over a month, and they are still beneath pity. 

This I cannot continue, time not sufficing; and 

the next will just have to be worse. All the 

good I can express is just this; some day, when 

style revisits me, they will be excellent matter 

to rewrite. Of course, my old cure of a change 

of work would probably answer, but I cannot 

take it now. The treadmill turns; and with a 

kind of desperate cheerfulness, I mount the 

idle stair. T7 .,. T „ 

— Vathtna Letters. 



XXIV 

An Analysis of the Fable Form 

The term Fable is not very easy to define 
rigorously. In the most typical form some 
moral precept is set forth by means of a con- 
ception purely fantastic, and usually somewhat 
trivial into the bargain; there is something play- 
ful about it, that will not support a very exact- 
ing criticism, and the lesson must be appre- 
hended by the fancy at half a hint. Such is 
the great mass of the old stories of wise animals 
or foolish men that have amused our childhood. 
But we should expect the fable, in company 
with other and more important literary forms, 



108 LEARNING TO WRITE 

to be more and more loosely, or at least largely, 
comprehended as time went on, and so to de- 
generate in conception from this original type. 
That depended for much of its piquancy on the 
very fact that it was fantastic: the point of the 
thing lay in a sort of humorous inappropriate- 
ness; and it is natural enough that pleasantry 
of this description should become less common, 
as men learn to suspect some serious analogy 
underneath. Thus a comical story of an ape 
touches us quite differently after the proposition 
of Mr. Darwin's theory. Moreover there lay, 
perhaps, at the bottom of this primitive sort of 
fable, a humanity, a tenderness of rough truths; 
so that at the end of some story, in which vice 
or folly had met with its destined punishment, 
the fabulist might be able to assure his auditors, 
as we have often to assure tearful children on 
the like occasions, that they may dry their 
eyes, for none of it was true. 

But this benefit of fiction becomes lost with 
more sophisticated hearers and authors: a man 
is no longer the dupe of his own artifice, and 
cannot deal playfully with truths that are a 
matter of bitter concern to him in his life. And 
hence, in the progressive centralisation of mod- 
ern thought, we should expect the old form of 
fable to fall gradually into desuetude, and be 
gradually succeeded by another, which is a 



OBSERVATIONS 109 

fable in all points except that it is not alto- 
gether fabulous. And this new form, such as 
we should expect, and such as we do indeed 
find, still presents the essential character of 
brevity; as in any other fable also, there is, un- 
derlying and animating the brief action, a moral 
idea; and as in any other fable, the object is to 
bring this home to the reader through the in- 
tellect rather than through the feelings; so that, 
without being very deeply moved or interested 
by the characters of the piece, we should recog- 
nise vividly the hinges on which the little plot 
revolves. But the fabulist now seeks analogies 
where before he merely sought humorous situa- 
tions. There will be now a logical nexus be- 
tween the moral expressed and the machinery 
employed to express it. The machinery, in 
fact, as this change is developed, becomes less 
and less fabulous. We find ourselves in pres- 
ence of quite a serious, if quite a miniature 
division of creative literature; and sometimes 
we have the lesson embodied in a sober, every- 
day narration, as in the parables of the New 
Testament, and sometimes merely the state- 
ment or, at most, the collocation of significant 
facts in life, the reader being left to resolve for 
himself the vague, troublesome, and not yet 
definitely moral sentiment which has been thus 
created. And step by step with the develop- 



no LEARNING TO WRITE 

ment of this change, yet another is developed: 
the moral tends to become more indeterminate 
and large. It ceases to be possible to append 
it, in a tag, to the bottom of the piece, as one 
might write the name below a caricature; and 
the fable begins to take rank with all other 
forms of creative literature, as something too 
ambitious, in spite of its miniature dimensions, 
to be resumed in any succinct formula without 
the loss of all that is deepest and most sugges- 
tive in it. ~ .,. . 

— Criticisms. 



XXV 

The Genesis of "The Master of 
Ballantrae" 

I was walking one night in the verandah of a 
small house in which I lived, outside the hamlet 
of Saranac. It was winter; the night was very 
dark; the air extraordinary clear and cold, and 
sweet with the purity of forests. From a good 
way below, the river was to be heard contend- 
ing with ice and boulders: a few lights appeared, 
scattered unevenly among the darkness, but so 
far away as not to lessen the sense of isolation. 
For the making of a story here were fine con- 
ditions. I was besides moved with the spirit 
of emulation, for I had just finished my third 



OBSERVATIONS in 

or fourth perusal of The Phantom Ship. " Come/' 
said I to my engine, "let us make a tale, a 
story of many years and countries, of the sea 
and the land, savagery and civilisation; a story 
that shall have the same large features and 
may be treated in the same summary elliptic 
method as the book you have been reading 
and admiring." I was here brought up with a 
reflection exceedingly just in itself, but which, 
as the sequel shows, I failed to profit by. I 
saw that Marryat, not less than Homer, Mil- 
ton, and Virgil, profited by the choice of a 
familiar and legendary subject; so that he pre- 
pared his readers on the very title-page; and 
this set me cudgelling my brains, if by any 
chance I could hit upon some similar belief 
to be the centrepiece of my own meditated fic- 
tion. In the course of this vain search there 
cropped up in my memory a singular case of a 
buried and resuscitated fakir, which I had been 
often told by an uncle of mine, then lately dead, 
Inspector-General John Balfour. 

On such a fine frosty night, with no wind and 
the thermometer below zero, the brain works 
with much vivacity; and the next moment I 
had seen the circumstance transplanted from 
India and the tropics to the Adirondack wilder- 
ness and the stringent cold of the Canadian 
border. Here then, almost before I had begun 



ii2 LEARNING TO WRITE 

my story, I had two countries, two of the ends 
of the earth involved: and thus though the no- 
tion of the resuscitated man failed entirely on 
the score of general acceptation, or even (as I 
have since found) acceptability, it fitted at 
once with my design of a tale of many lands; 
and this decided me to consider further of its 
possibilities. The man who should thus be 
buried was the first question: a good man, whose 
return to life would be hailed by the reader 
and the other characters with gladness? This 
trenched upon the Christian picture and was 
dismissed. If the idea, then, was to be of any 
use at all for me, I had to create a kind of evil 
genius to his friends and family, take him 
through many disappearances, and make this 
final restoration from the pit of death, in the 
icy American wilderness, the last and grim- 
mest of the series. I need not tell my brothers 
of the craft that I was now in the most inter- 
esting moment of an author's life; the hours 
that followed that night upon the balcony, and 
the following nights and days, whether walking 
abroad or lying wakeful in my bed, were hours 
of unadulterated joy. My mother, who was 
then living with me alone, perhaps had less en- 
joyment; for, in the absence of my wife, who is / 
my usual helper in these times of parturition, 
I must spur her up at all seasons to hear 



OBSERVATIONS 113 

me relate and try to clarify my unformed 
fancies. 

And while I was groping for the fable and the 
characters required, behold, I found them lying 
ready and nine years old in my memory. Pease 
porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease por- 
ridge in the pot, nine years old. Was there 
ever a more complete justification of the rule 
of Horace? Here, thinking of quite other 
things, I had stumbled on the solution, or per- 
haps I should rather say (in stagewright phrase) 
the Curtain or final Tableau of a story con- 
ceived long before on the moors between Pit- 
lochry and Strathardle, conceived in the High- 
land rain, in the blend of the smell of heather 
and bog-plants, and with a mind full of the 
A thole correspondence and the memories of the 
dumlicide Justice. So long ago, so far away it 
was, that I had first evoked the faces and the 
mutual tragic situation of the men of Durisdeer. 

My story was now world-wide enough: Scot- 
land, India, and America being all obligatory 
scenes. But of these India was strange to me 
except in books; I had never known any liv- 
ing Indian save a Parsee, a member of my club 
in London, equally civilised and (to all seeing) 
equally occidental with myself. It was plain, 
thus far, that I should have to get into India 
and out of it again upon a foot of fairy light- 



ii 4 LEARNING TO WRITE 

ness; and I believe this first suggested to me the 
idea of the Chevalier Burke for a narrator. It 
was at first intended that he should be Scot- 
tish, and I was then filled with fears that he 
might prove only the degraded shadow of my 
own Alan Breck. Presently, however, it began 
to occur to me it would be like my Master to 
curry favour with the Prince's Irishmen; and 
that an Irish refugee would have a particular 
reason to find himself in India with his country- 
man, the unfortunate Lally. Irish, therefore, I 
decided he should be, and then, all of a sudden, 
I was aware of a tall shadow across my path, 
the shadow of Barry Lyndon. No man (in 
Lord Foppington's phrase) of a nice morality 
could go very deep with my Master: in the 
original idea of this story conceived in Scot- 
land, this companion had been besides intended 
to be worse than the bad elder son with whom 
(as it was then meant) he was to visit Scotland; 
if I took an Irishman, and a very bad Irishman, 
in the midst of the eighteenth century, how was 
I to evade Barry Lyndon? The wretch be- 
sieged me, offering his services; he gave me ex- 
cellent references; he proved that he was 
highly fitted for the work I had to do; he, or 
my own evil heart, suggested it was easy to 
disguise his ancient livery with a little lace and 
a few frogs and buttons, so that Thackeray 



OBSERVATIONS 115 

himself should hardly recognise him. And then 
of a sudden there came to me memories of a 
young Irishman, with whom I was once intimate, 
and had spent long nights walking and talking 
with, upon a very desolate coast in a bleak 
autumn: I recalled him as a youth of an extraor- 
dinary moral simplicity — almost vacancy; plastic 
to any influence, the creature of his admira- 
tions: and putting such a youth in fancy into 
the career of a soldier of fortune, it occurred to 
me that he would serve my turn as well as Mr. 
Lyndon, and in place of entering into com- 
petition with the Master, would afford a slight 
though a distinct relief. I know not if I have 
done him well, though his moral dissertations 
always highly entertained me: but I own I have 
been surprised to find that he reminded some 
critics of Barry Lyndon after all. . . . 



XXVI 

How the Romantic Movement Freed the 
Imagination in Writing 

With Scott the Romantic movement, the 
movement of an extended curiosity and an en- 
franchised imagination, has begun. This is a 
trite thing to say, but trite things are often very 
indefinitely comprehended: and this enfran- 



n6 LEARNING TO WRITE 

chisement, in as far as it regards the technical 
change that came over modern prose romance, 
has never perhaps been explained with any 
clearness. 

To do so, it will be necessary roughly to com- 
pare the two sets of conventions upon which 
plays and romances are respectively based. The 
purposes of these two arts are so much alike, 
and they deal so much with the same passions 
and interests, that we are apt to forget the 
fundamental opposition of their methods. And 
yet such a fundamental opposition exists. In 
the drama the action is developed in great 
measure by means of things that remain out- 
side of the art; by means of real things, that is, 
and not artistic conventions for things. This 
is a sort of realism that is not to be confounded 
with that realism in painting of which we 
hear so much. The realism in painting is a 
thing of purposes; this, that we have to indi- 
cate in the drama, is an affair of method. We 
have heard a story, indeed, of a painter in 
France who, when he wanted to paint a sea- 
beach, carried realism from his ends to his 
means, and plastered real sand upon his canvas; 
and that is precisely what is done in the drama. 
The dramatic author has to paint his beaches 
with real sand: real live men and women move 
about the stage; we hear real voices; what is 



OBSERVATIONS 117 

feigned merely puts a sense upon what is; we 
do actually see a woman go behind a screen as 
Lady Teazle, and, after a certain interval, we 
do actually see her very shamefully produced 
again. Now all these things, that remain as 
they were in life, and are not transmuted into 
any artistic convention, are terribly stubborn 
and difficult to deal with; and hence there are 
for the dramatist many resultant limitations in 
time and space. These limitations in some 
sort approximate toward those of painting: the 
dramatic author is tied down, not indeed to a 
moment, but to the duration of each scene or 
act; he is confined to the stage, almost as the 
painter is confined within his frame. But the 
great restriction is this, that a dramatic author 
must deal with his actors, and with his actors 
alone. Certain moments of suspense, certain 
significant dispositions of personages, a certain 
logical growth of emotion, these are the only 
means at the disposal of the playwright. It 
is true that, with the assistance of the scene- 
painter, the costumer and the conductor of the 
orchestra, he may add to this something of 
pageant, something of sound and fury; but 
these are, for the dramatic writer, beside the 
mark, and do not come under the vivifying 
touch of his genius. When we turn to romance, 
we find this no longer. Here nothing is repro- 



n8 LEARNING TO WRITE 

duced to our senses directly. Not only the 
main conception of the work, but the scenery, 
the appliances, the mechanism by which this 
conception is brought home to us, have been 
put through the crucible of another man's 
mind, and come out again, one and all, in the 
form of written words. With the loss of every 
degree of such realism as we have described, 
there is for art a clear gain of liberty and large- 
ness of competence. Thus, painting, in which 
the round outlines of things are thrown on to a 
flat board, is far more free than sculpture, in 
which their solidity is preserved. It is by giv- 
ing up these identities that art gains true 
strength. And so in the case of novels as com- 
pared with the stage. Continuous narration is 
the flat board on to which the novelist throws 
everything. And from this there results for 
him a great loss of vividness, but a great com- 
pensating gain in his power over the subject; 
so that he can now subordinate one thing to 
another in importance, and introduce all man- 
ner of very subtle detail, to a degree that was 
before impossible. He can render just as easily 
the flourish of trumpets before a victorious 
emperor and the gossip of country market 
women, the gradual decay of forty years of a 
man's life and the gesture of a passionate mo- 
ment. He finds himself equally unable, if he 



OBSERVATIONS 119 

looks at it from one point of view — equally 
able, if he looks at it from another point of 
view — to reproduce a colour, a sound, an out- 
line, a logical argument, a physical action. He 
can show his readers, behind and around the 
personages that for the moment occupy the 
foreground of his story, the continual suggestion 
of the landscape; the turn of the weather that 
will turn with it men's lives and fortunes, dimly 
foreshadowed on the horizon; the fatality of 
distant events, the stream of national tendency, 
the salient framework of causation. And all 
this thrown upon the flat board — all this en- 
tering, naturally and smoothly, into the tex- 
ture of continuous intelligent narration. 

— Familiar Studies of Men and Books. 



VIII 

THE MORALITY OF THE PROFESSION 
OF LETTERS 

The profession of letters has been lately de- 
bated in the public prints; and it has been de- 
bated, to put the matter mildly, from a point 
of view that was calculated to surprise high- 
minded men, and bring a general contempt on 
books and reading. Some time ago, in par- 
ticular, a* lively, pleasant, popular writer de- 
voted an essay, lively and pleasant like himself, 
to a very encouraging view of the profession. 
We may be glad that his experience is so cheer- 
ing, and we may hope that all others, who de- 
serve it, shall be as handsomely rewarded; but 
I do not think we need be at all glad to have this 
question, so important to the public and our- 
selves, debated solely on the ground of money. 
The salary in any business under heaven is not 
the only, nor indeed the first, question. That 
you should continue to exist is a matter for your 
own consideration; but that your business 
should be first honest, and second useful, are 
points in which honour and morality are con- 



THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS 121 

cerned. If the writer to whom I refer succeeds 
in persuading a number of young persons to 
adopt this way of life with an eye set singly on 
the livelihood, we must expect them in their 
works to follow profit only, and we must expect 
in consequence, if he will pardon me the epithets, 
a slovenly, base, untrue, and empty literature. 
Of that writer himself I am not speaking: he is 
diligent, clean, and pleasing; we all owe him 
periods of entertainment, and he has achieved 
an amiable popularity which he has adequately 
deserved. But the truth is, he does not, or did 
not when he first embraced it, regard his pro- 
fession from this purely mercenary side. He 
went into it, I shall venture to say, if not with 
any noble design, at least in the ardour of a 
first love; and he enjoyed its practice long be- 
fore he paused to calculate the wage. The 
other day an author was complimented on a 
piece of work, good in itself and exceptionally 
good for him, and replied, in terms unworthy of 
a commercial traveller, that as the book was 
not briskly selling he did not give a copper 
farthing for its merit. It must not be supposed 
that the person to whom this answer was ad- 
dressed received it as a profession of faith; he 
knew, on the other hand, that it was only a 
whiff of irritation; just as we know, when a 
respectable writer talks of literature as a way 



122 LEARNING TO WRITE 

of life, like shoemaking, but not so useful, that 
he is only debating one aspect of a question, 
and is still clearly conscious of a dozen others 
more important in themselves and more central 
to the matter in hand. But while those who 
treat literature in this penny-wise and virtue- 
foolish spirit are themselves truly in possession 
of a better light, it does not follow that the treat- 
ment is decent or improving, whether for them- 
selves or others. To treat all subjects in the 
highest, the most honourable, and the pluckiest 
spirit, consistent with the fact, is the first duty 
of a writer. If he be well paid, as I am glad to 
hear he is, this duty becomes the more urgent, 
the neglect of it the more disgraceful. And 
perhaps there is no subject on which a man 
should speak so gravely as that industry, what- 
ever it may be, which is the occupation or de- 
light of his life; which is his tool to earn or serve 
with; and which, if it be unworthy, stamps him- 
self as a mere incubus of dumb and greedy 
bowels on the shoulders of labouring humanity. 
On that subject alone even to force the note 
might lean to virtue's side. It is to be hoped 
that a numerous and enterprising generation of 
writers will follow and surpass the present one; 
but it would be better if the stream were stayed, 
and the roll of our old, honest English books 
were closed, than that esurient book-makers 



THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS 123 

should continue and debase a brave tradition, 
and lower, in their own eyes, a famous race. 
Better that our serene temples were deserted 
than filled with trafficking and juggling priests. 
There are two just reasons for the choice of 
any way of life: the first is inbred taste in the 
chooser; the second some high utility in the 
industry selected. Literature, like any other 
art, is singularly interesting to the artist; and, 
in a degree peculiar to itself among the arts, 
it is useful to mankind. These are the sufficient 
justifications for any young man or woman who 
adopts it as the business of his life. I shall not 
say much about the wages. A writer can live 
by his writing. If not so luxuriously as by 
other trades, then less luxuriously. The nature 
of the work he does all day will more affect his 
happiness than the quality of his dinner at 
night. Whatever be your calling, and how- 
ever much it brings you in the year, you could 
still, you know, get more by cheating. We all 
suffer ourselves to be too much concerned about 
a little poverty; but such considerations should 
not move us in the choice of that which is to 
be the business and justification of so great a 
portion of our lives; and like the missionary, 
the patriot, or the philosopher, we should all 
choose that poor and brave career in which we 
can do the most and best for mankind. Now 



124 LEARNING TO WRITE 

nature, faithfully followed, proves herself a 
careful mother. A lad, for some liking to the 
jingle of words, betakes himself to letters for 
his life; by-and-by, when he learns more grav- 
ity, he finds that he has chosen better than he 
knew; that if he earns little, he is earning it 
amply; that if he receives a small wage, he is 
in a position to do considerable services; that it 
is in his power, in some small measure, to pro- 
tect the oppressed and to defend the truth. 
So kindly is the world arranged, such great 
profit may arise from a small degree of human 
reliance on oneself, and such, in particular, is 
the happy star of this trade of writing, that it 
should combine pleasure and profit to both 
parties, and be at once agreeable, like fiddling, 
and useful, like good preaching. 

This is to speak of literature at its highest; 
and with the four great elders who are still 
spared to our respect and admiration, with 
Carlyle, Ruskin, Browning, and Tennyson be- 
fore us, it would be cowardly to consider it at 
first in any lesser aspect. But while we cannot 
follow these athletes, while we may none of 
us, perhaps, be very vigorous, very original, or 
very wise, I still contend that, in the humblest 
sort of literary work, we have it in our power 
either to do great harm or great good. We may 
seek merely to please; we may seek, having no 



THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS 125 

higher gift, merely to gratify the idle nine days' 
curiosity of our contemporaries; or we may 
essay, however feebly, to instruct. In each of 
these we shall have to deal with that remark- 
able art of words which, because it is the dialect 
of life, comes home so easily and powerfully 
to the minds of men; and since that is so, we 
contribute, in each of these branches, to build 
up the sum of sentiments and appreciations 
which goes by the name of Public Opinion or 
Public Feeling. The total of a nation's read- 
ing, in these days of daily papers, greatly modi- 
fies the total of the nation's speech; and the 
speech and reading, taken together, form the 
efficient educational medium of youth. A good 
man or woman may keep a youth some little 
while in clearer air; but the contemporary at- 
mosphere is all-powerful in the end on the aver- 
age of mediocre characters. The copious 
Corinthian baseness of the American reporter 
or the Parisian chroniquer, both so lightly read- 
able, must exercise an incalculable influence 
for ill; they touch upon all subjects, and on all 
with the same ungenerous hand; they begin the 
consideration of all, in young and unprepared 
minds, in an unworthy spirit; on all, they sup- 
ply some pungency for dull people to quote. 
The mere body of this ugly matter overwhelms 
the rare utterances of good men; the sneering, 



126 LEARNING TO WRITE 

the selfish, and the cowardly are scattered in 
broad sheets on every table, while the antidote, 
in small volumes, lies unread upon the shelf. 
I have spoken of the American and the French, 
not because they are so much baser, but so 
much more readable, than the English; their 
evil is done more effectively, in America for 
the masses, in French for the few that care to 
read; but with us as with them, the duties of 
literature are daily neglected, truth daily per- 
verted and suppressed, and grave subjects daily 
degraded in the treatment. The journalist is 
not reckoned an important officer; yet judge 
of the good he might do, the harm he does; 
judge of it by one instance only: that when we 
find two journals on the reverse sides of politics 
each, on the same day, openly garbling a piece 
of news for the interest of its own party, we 
smile at the discovery (no discovery now!) as 
over a good joke and pardonable stratagem. 
Lying so open is scarce lying, it is true; but one 
of the things that we profess to teach our young 
is a respect for truth; and I cannot think this 
piece of education will be crowned with any 
great success, so long as some of us practise 
and the rest openly approve of public falsehood. 
There are two duties incumbent upon any 
man who enters on the business of writing: truth 
to the fact and a good spirit in the treatment. 



THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS 127 

In every department of literature, though so 
low as hardly to deserve the name, truth to the 
fact is of importance to the education and com- 
fort of mankind, and so hard to preserve, that 
the faithful trying to do so will lend some 
dignity to the man who tries it. Our judg- 
ments are based upon two things: first, upon 
the original preferences of our soul; but, second, 
upon the mass of testimony to the nature of 
God, man, and the universe which reaches us, 
in divers manners, from without. For the most 
part these divers manners are reducible to one, 
all that we learn of past times and much that 
we learn of our own reaching us through the 
medium of books or papers, and even he who 
cannot read learning from the same source at 
second-hand and by the report of him who 
can. Thus the sum of the contemporary 
knowledge or ignorance of good and evil is, in 
large measure, the handiwork of those who 
write. Those who write have to see that each 
man's knowledge is, as near as they can make 
it, answerable to the facts of life; that he shall 
not suppose himself an angel or a monster; 
nor take this world for a hell; nor be suffered 
to imagine that all rights are concentred in 
his own caste or country, or all veracities in 
his own parochial creed. Each man should learn 
what is within him, that he may strive to mend; 



128 LEARNING TO WRITE 

he must be taught what is without him, that 
he may be kind to others. It can never be 
wrong to tell him the truth; for, in his disputable 
state, weaving as he goes his theory of life, 
steering himself, cheering or reproving others, 
all facts are of the first importance to his con- 
duct; and even if a fact shall discourage or 
corrupt him, it is still best that he should know 
it; for it is in this world as it is, and not in a 
world made easy by educational suppressions, 
that he must win his way to shame or glory. 
In one word, it must always be foul to tell what 
is false; and it can never be safe to suppress 
what is true. The very fact that you omit 
may be the fact which somebody was wanting, 
for one man's meat is another man's poison, 
and I have known a person who was cheered 
by the perusal of Candide. Every fact is a part 
of that great puzzle we must set together; and 
none that comes directly in a writer's path but 
has some nice relations, unperceivable by him, 
to the totality and bearing of the subject under 
hand. Yet there are certain classes of fact 
eternally more necessary than others, and it is 
with these that literature must first bestir it- 
self. They are not hard to distinguish, nature 
once more easily leading us; for the necessary, 
because the efficacious, facts are those which 
are most interesting to the natural mind of 



THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS 129 

man. Those which are coloured, picturesque, 
human, and rooted in morality, and those, on 
the other hand, which are clear, indisputable, 
and a part of science, are alone vital in impor- 
tance, seizing by their interest, or useful to 
communicate. So far as the writer merely nar- 
rates, he should principally tell of these. He 
should tell of the kind and wholesome and 
beautiful elements of our life; he should tell 
unsparingly of the evil and sorrow of the pres- 
ent, to move us with instances; he should tell 
of wise and good people in the past, to excite us 
by example; and of these he should tell soberly 
and truthfully, not glossing faults, that we may 
neither grow discouraged with ourselves nor 
exacting to our neighbours. So the body of 
contemporary literature, ephemeral and feeble 
in itself, touches in the minds of men the springs 
of thought and kindness, and supports them 
(for those who will go at all are easily sup- 
ported) on their way to what is true and right. 
And if, in any degree, it does so now, how much 
more might it do so if the writers chose ! There 
is not a life in all the records of the past but, 
properly studied, might lend a hint and a help 
to some contemporary. There is not a junc- 
ture in to-day's affairs but some useful word 
may yet be said of it. Even the reporter has 
an office, and, with clear eyes and honest Ian- 



i 3 o LEARNING TO WRITE 

guage, may unveil injustices and point the way 
to progress. And for a last word: in all narra- 
tion there is only one way to be clever, and 
that is to be exact. To be vivid is a secondary 
quality which must presuppose the first; for 
vividly to convey a wrong impression is only to 
make failure conspicuous. 

But a fact may be viewed on many sides; it 
may be chronicled with rage, tears, laughter, 
indifference, or admiration, and by each of 
these the story will be transformed to something 
else. The newspapers that told of the return 
of our representatives from Berlin, even if 
they had not differed as to the facts, would 
have sufficiently differed by their spirits; so 
that the one description would have been a 
second ovation, and the other a prolonged in- 
sult. The subject makes but a trifling part of 
any piece of literature, and the view of the 
writer is itself a fact more important because 
less disputable than the others. Now this spirit 
in which a subject is regarded, important in all 
kinds of literary work, becomes all-important in 
works of fiction, meditation, or rhapsody; for 
there it not only colours but itself chooses the 
facts; not only modifies but shapes the work. 
And hence, over the far larger proportion of the 
field of literature, the health or disease of the 



THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS 131 

writer's mind or momentary humour forms not 
only the leading feature of his work, but is, at 
bottom, the only thing he can communicate to 
others. In all works of art, widely speaking, 
it is first of all the author's attitude that is 
narrated, though in the attitude there be im- 
plied a whole experience and a theory of life. 
An author who has begged the question and 
reposes in some narrow faith cannot, if he would, 
express the whole or even many of the sides of 
this various existence; for, his own life being 
maim, some of them are not admitted in his 
theory, and were only dimly and unwillingly 
recognised in his experience. Hence the small- 
ness, the triteness, and the inhumanity in works 
of merely sectarian religion; and hence we find 
equal although unsimilar limitation in works 
inspired by the spirit of the flesh or the despi- 
cable taste for high society. So that the first 
duty of any man who is to write is intellectual. 
Designedly or not, he has so far set himself up 
for a leader of the minds of men; and he must 
see that his own mind is kept supple, charitable, 
and bright. Everything but prejudice should 
find a voice through him; he should see the good 
in all things; where he has even a fear that he 
does not wholly understand, there he should 
be wholly silent; and he should recognise from 



i 3 2 LEARNING TO WRITE 

the first that he has only one tool in his work- 
shop, and that tool is sympathy.* 

The second duty, far harder to define, is 
moral. There are a thousand different humours 
in the mind, and about each of them, when it is 
uppermost, some literature tends to be depos- 
ited. Is this to be allowed? Not certainly in 
every case, and yet perhaps in more than rig- 
ourists would fancy. It were to be desired that 
all literary work, and chiefly works of art, 
issued from sound, human, healthy, and potent 
impulses, whether grave or laughing, humor- 
ous, romantic, or religious. Yet it cannot be 
denied that some valuable books are partially 
insane; some, mostly religious, partially in- 
human; and very many tainted with morbidity 
and impotence. We do not loathe a master- 
piece although we gird against its blemishes. 
We are not, above all, to look for faults, but 
merits. There is no book perfect, even in de- 
sign; but there are many that will delight, 
improve, or encourage the reader. On the 
one hand, the Hebrew psalms are the only re- 



* A footnote, at least, is due to the admirable example set 
before all young writers in the width of literary sympathy dis- 
played by Mr. Swinburne. He runs forth to welcome merit, 
whether in Dickens or Trollope, whether in Villon, Milton, or 
Pope. This is, in criticism, the attitude we should all seek to 
preserve, not only in that, but in every branch of literary 
work. 



THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS 133 

ligious poetry on earth; yet they contain sallies 
that savour rankly of the man of blood. On 
the other hand, Alfred de Musset had a poi- 
soned and a contorted nature; I am only quoting 
that generous and frivolous giant, old Dumas, 
when I accuse him of a bad heart; yet, when the 
impulse under which he wrote was purely crea- 
tive, he could give us works like Carmosine or 
FantastOj in which the last note of the romantic 
comedy seems to have been found again to 
touch and please us. When Flaubert wrote 
Madame Bovary, I believe he thought chiefly of 
a somewhat morbid realism; and behold ! the 
book turned in his hands into a masterpiece of 
appalling morality. But the truth is, when 
books are conceived under a great stress, with 
a soul of ninefold power, nine times heated 
and electrified by effort, the conditions of our 
being are seized with such an ample grasp, that, 
even should the main design be trivial or base, 
some truth and beauty cannot fail to be ex- 
pressed. Out of the strong comes forth sweet- 
ness; but an ill thing poorly done is an ill thing 
top and bottom. And so this can be no encour- 
agement to knock-kneed, feeble-wristed scribes, 
who must take their business conscientiously or 
be ashamed to practise it. 

Man is imperfect; yet, in his literature, he 
must express himself and his own views and 



134 LEARNING TO WRITE 

preferences; for to do anything else is to do a 
far more perilous thing than to risk being im- 
moral: it is to be sure of being untrue. To ape 
a sentiment, even a good one, is to travesty a 
sentiment; that will not be helpful. To con- 
ceal a sentiment, if you are sure you hold it, is 
to take a liberty with truth. There is prob- 
ably no point of view possible to a sane man but 
contains some truth and, in the true connec- 
tion, might be profitable to the race. I am not 
afraid of the truth, if any one could tell it me, 
but I am afraid of parts of it impertinently ut- 
tered. There is a time to dance and a time to 
mourn; to be harsh as well as to be sentimental; 
to be ascetic as well as to glorify the appetites; 
and if a man were to combine all these extremes 
into his work, each in its place and proportion, 
that work would be the world's masterpiece of 
morality as well as of art. Partiality is im- 
morality; for any book is wrong that gives a 
misleading picture of the world and life. The 
trouble is that the weakling must be partial; the 
work of one proving dank and depressing; of 
another, cheap and vulgar; of a third, epilep- 
tically sensual; of a fourth, sourly ascetic. In 
literature as in conduct, you can never hope to 
do exactly right. All you can do is to make as 
sure as possible; and for that there is but one 
rule. Nothing should be done in a hurry that 



THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS 135 

can be done slowly. It is no use to write a 
book and put it by for nine or even ninety 
years; for in the writing you will have partly 
convinced yourself; the delay must precede any 
beginning; and if you meditate a work of art, 
you should first long roll the subject under the 
tongue to make sure you like the flavour, be- 
fore you brew a volume that shall taste of it 
from end to end; or if you propose to enter on 
the field of controversy, you should first have 
thought upon the question under all conditions, 
in health as well as in sickness, in sorrow as 
well as in joy. It is this nearness of examina- 
tion necessary for any true and kind writing, 
that makes the practice of the art a prolonged 
and noble education for the writer. 

There is plenty to do, plenty to say, or to say 
over again, in the meantime. Any literary work 
which conveys faithful facts or pleasing im- 
pressions is a service to the public. It is even a 
service to be thankfully proud of having ren- 
dered. The slightest novels are a blessing to 
those in distress, not chloroform itself a greater. 
Our fine old sea-captain's life was justified when 
Carlyle soothed his mind with The King's Own 
or Newton Forster. To please is to serve; and 
so far from its being difficult to instruct while 
you amuse, it is difficult to do the one thoroughly 
without the other. Some part of the writer or 



136 LEARNING TO WRITE 

his life will crop out in even a vapid book; and 
to read a novel that was conceived with any 
force is to multiply experience and to exercise 
the sympathies. Every article, every piece of 
verse, every essay, every entre-filet, is destined 
to pass, however swiftly, through the minds of 
some portion of the public, and to colour, how- 
ever transiently, their thoughts. When any 
subject falls to be discussed, some scribbler on a 
paper has the invaluable opportunity of be- 
ginning its discussion in a dignified and human 
spirit; and if there were enough who did so in 
our public press, neither the public nor the 
Parliament would find it in their minds to drop 
to meaner thoughts. The writer has the chance 
to stumble, by the way, on something pleasing, 
something interesting, something encouraging, 
were it only to a single reader. He will be 
unfortunate, indeed, if he suit no one. He has 
the chance, besides, to stumble on something 
that a dull person shall be able to comprehend; 
and for a dull person to have read anything 
and, for that once, comprehended it, makes a 
marking epoch in his education. 

Here, then, is work worth doing and worth 
trying to do well. And so, if I were minded to 
welcome any great accession to our trade, it 
should not be from any reason of a higher 
wage, but because it was a trade which was 



THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS 137 

useful in a very great and in a very high de- 
gree; which every honest tradesman could make 
more serviceable to mankind in his single 
strength; which was difficult to do well and 
possible to do better every year; which called 
for scrupulous thought on the part of all who 
practised it, and hence became a perpetual 
education to their nobler natures; and which, 
pay it as you please, in the large majority of 
the best cases will still be underpaid. For 
surely, at this time of day in the nineteenth 
century, there is nothing that an honest man 
should fear more timorously than getting and 
spending more than he deserves. 



POPULAR AUTHORS 

The scene is the deck of an Atlantic liner, 
close by the doors of the ashpit, where it is 
warm: the time, night: the persons, an emigrant 
of an inquiring turn of mind and a deck hand. 
"Now," says the emigrant, "is there not any 
book that gives a true picture of a sailor's 
life?" — "Well," returns the other, with great 
deliberation and emphasis, "there is one; that 
is just a sailor's life. You know all about it, if 
you know that." — "What do you call it?" 
asks the emigrant. — "They call it Tom Holt's 
Log" says the sailor. The emigrant entered 
the fact in his note-book: with a wondering 
query as to what sort of stuff this Tom Holt 
would prove to be: and a double-headed proph- 
ecy that it would prove one of two things: 
either a solid, dull, admirable piece of truth, 
or mere ink and banditti. Well, the emigrant 
was wrong: it was something more curious than 
either, for it was a work by Stephens Hayward. 

Copyright, 1888, 1895, by Charles Scribner's Sons. 
138 



POPULAR AUTHORS 139 



In this paper I propose to put the authors' 
names in capital letters; the most of them have 
not much hope of durable renown; their day is 
past, the poor dogs — they begin swiftly to be 
forgotten; and Hayward is of the number. 
Yet he was a popular writer; and what is really 
odd, he had a vein of hare-brained merit. There 
never was a man of less pretension; the intoxi- 
cating presence of an ink-bottle, which was too 
much for the strong head of Napoleon, left 
him sober and light-hearted; he had no shade 
of literary vanity; he was never at the trouble 
to be dull. His works fell out of date in the 
days of printing. They were the unhatched 
eggs of Arab tales; made for word-of -mouth 
recitation, certain (if thus told) to captivate an 
audience of boys or any simple people — cer- 
tain, on the lips of a generation or two of public 
story-tellers, to take on new merit and become 
cherished lore. Such tales as a man, such 
rather as a boy, tells himself at night, not with- 
out smiling, as he drops asleep; such, with the 
same exhilarating range of incident and the 
same trifling ingenuities, with no more truth 
to experience and scarcely more cohesion, 
Hayward told. If we so consider The Diamond 



i 4 o LEARNING TO WRITE 

Necklace or the Twenty Captains, which is what 
I remember best of Hayward, you will find that 
staggering narrative grow quite conceivable. 

A gentleman (his name forgotten — Hayward 
had no taste in names) puts an advertisement 
in the papers, inviting nineteen other gentlemen 
to join him in a likely enterprise. The nine- 
teen appear promptly, nineteen, no more, no 
less: see the ease of the recumbent story-teller, 
half-asleep, hanging on the verge of that coun- 
try of dreams, where candles come alight and 
journeys are accomplished at the wishing! 
These twenty, all total strangers, are to put 
their money together and form an association 
of strict equality: hence its name — The Twenty 
Captains. And it is no doubt very pleasant to 
be equal to anybody, even in name; and mighty 
desirable (at least in the eyes of young gentle- 
men hearing this tale in the school dormitory) 
to be called captain, even in private. But the 
deuce of it is, the founder has no enterprise in 
view, and here you would think, the least wary 
capitalist would leave his chair, and buy a 
broom and a crossing with his money, rather 
than place it in the hands of this total stranger, 
whose mind by his own confession was a blank, 
and whose real name was probably Macaire. 
No such matter in the book. With the ease of 
dreaming, the association is founded; and again 



POPULAR AUTHORS 141 

with the ease of dreaming (Hayward being 
now three parts asleep) the enterprise, in the 
shape of a persecuted heiress and a truly dam- 
nable and idiotic aristocrat, appears upon the 
scene. For some time, our drowsy story-teller 
dodges along upon the frontiers of incoherence, 
hardly at the trouble to invent, never at the 
trouble to write literature; but suddenly his 
interest brightens up, he sees something in 
front of him, turns on the pillow, shakes off the 
tentacles of slumber, and puts his back into his 
tale. Injured innocence takes a special train 
to Dover; damnable idiot takes another and 
pursues; the twenty captains reach the station 
five minutes after, and demand a third. It is 
against the rules, they are told; not more than 
two specials (here is good news for the railway 
traveller) are allowed at the same time upon 
the line. Is injured innocence, with her dia- 
mond necklace, to lie at the mercy of an aris- 
tocrat? Forbid it, Heaven and the Cheap 
Press! The twenty captains slip unobserved 
into the engine-house, steal an engine, and 
forth upon the Dover line! As well as I can 
gather, there were no stations and no points- 
men on this route to Dover, which must in 
consequence be quick and safe. One thing it 
had in common with other and less simple rail- 
ways, it had a line of telegraph wires; and these 



i 4 2 LEARNING TO WRITE 

the twenty captains decided to destroy. One 
of them, you will not be surprised to learn, had a 
coil of rope — in his pocket, I suppose; another — 
again I shall not surprise you — was an Irish- 
man and given to blundering. One end of the 
line was made fast to a telegraph post; one (by 
the Irishman) to the engine: all aboard — full 
steam ahead — a double crash, and there was 
the telegraph post upon the ground, and here — 
mark my Hayward! was something carried 
away upon the engine. All eyes turn to see 
what it is: an integral part of the machinery! 
There is now no means of reducing speed; on 
thunders the engine, full steam ahead, down 
this remarkable route to Dover; on speed the 
twenty captains, not very easy in their minds. 
Presently, the driver of the second special (the 
aristocrat's) looks behind him, sees an engine 
on his track, signals, signals in vain, finds him- 
self being overhauled, pokes up his fire and — 
full steam ahead in flight. Presently after, the 
driver of the first special (injured innocence's) 
looks behind, sees a special on his track and an 
engine on the track of the special, signals, sig- 
nals in vain, and he too — full steam ahead in 
flight. Such a day on the Dover line! But 
at last the second special smashes into the first, 
and the engine into both; and for my part, I 
think there was an end of that romance. But 



POPULAR AUTHORS 143 

Hayward was by this time fast asleep: not a 
life was lost; nor only that, but the various par- 
ties recovered consciousness and resumed their 
wild career (only now, of course, on foot and 
across country) in the precise original order: 
injured innocence leading by a length, damna- 
ble aristocrat with still more damnable valet 
(like one man) a good second, and the twenty 
captains (again like one man) a bad third; so 
that here was the story going on again just as 
before, and this appalling catastrophe on the 
Dover line reduced to the proportions of a 
morning call. The feelings of the company (it 
is true) are not dwelt upon. 

Now, I do not mean that Tom Holt is quite 
such high-flying folly as The Twenty Captains; 
for it is no such thing, nor half so entertaining. 
Still it flowed from the same irresponsible 
brain; still it was the mere drowsy divagation 
of a man in bed, now tedious, now extravagant 
— always acutely untrue to life as it is, often 
pleasantly coincident with childish hopes of 
what life ought to be — as (for instance) in the 
matter of that little pleasure-boat, rigged, to 
every block and rope, as a full-rigged ship, in 
which Tom goes sailing — happy child! And 
this was the work that an actual tarry seaman 
recommended for a picture of his own existence ! 



i44 LEARNING TO WRITE 



II 

It was once my fortune to have an interview 
with Mr. Hayward's publisher: a very affable 
gentleman in a very small office in a shady 
court off Fleet Street. We had some talk to- 
gether of the works he issued and the authors 
who supplied them; and it was strange to hear 
him talk for all the world as one of our pub- 
lishers might have talked of one of us, only 
with a more obliging frankness, so that the 
private life of these great men was more or 
less unveiled to me. So and so (he told me, 
among other things) had demanded an advance 
upon a novel, had laid out the sum (apparently 
on spirituous drinks) and refused to finish the 
work. "We had to put it in the hands of 
Bracebridge Hemming," said the publisher 
with a chuckle: "he finished it." And then 
with conviction: "A most reliable author, 
Bracebridge Hemming." I have no doubt 
the name is new to the reader; it was not so to 
me. Among these great men of the dust, there 
is a touching ambition which punishes itself; 
not content with such glory as comes to them, 
they long for the glory of being bound — long to 
invade, between six boards, the homes of that 
aristocracy whose manners they so often find 



POPULAR AUTHORS 145 

occasion to expose; and sometimes (once in a 
long lifetime) the gods give them this also, and 
they appear in the orthodox three volumes, 
and are fleered at in the critical press, and lie 
quite unread in circulating libraries. One such 
work came in my mind: The Bondage of Bran- 
don, by Bracebridge Hemming. I had not 
found much pleasure in the volumes; but I was 
the more glad to think that Mr. Hemming's 
name was quite a household word, and himself 
quoted for "a reliable author," in his own liter- 
ary circles. 

On my way westward from this interview, I 
was aware of a first floor in Fleet Street rigged 
up with wire window-blinds, brass straps, and 
gilt lettering: Office for the sale of the works of 
Pierce Egan. "Ay, Mr. Egan," thought I, 
"and have you an office all to yourself !" And 
then remembered that he too had once revelled 
in three volumes: The Flower of the Flock the 
book was called, not without pathos for the 
considerate mind; but even the flower of Egan's 
flock was not good enough for the critics or the 
circulating libraries, so that I purchased my 
own copy, quite unread, for three shillings at a 
railway bookstall. Poor dogs, I thought, what 
ails you, that you should have the desire of 
this fictitious upper popularity, made by hack 
journalists and countersigned by yawning girls? 



146 LEARNING TO WRITE 

Yours is the more true. Your butcher, the 
landlady at your seaside lodgings — if you can 
afford that indulgence, the barmaid whom you 
doubtless court, even the Rates and Taxes that 
besiege your door, have actually read your 
tales and actually know your names. There 
was a waiter once (or so the story goes) who 
knew not the name of Tennyson: that of 
Hemming perhaps had brought the light into 
his eyes, or Viles perhaps, or Errym, or the 
great J. F. Smith, or the unutterable Reynolds, 
to whom even here I must deny his capitals. — 
Fancy, if you can (thought I), that I languish 
under the reverse of your complaint; and being 
an upper-class author, bound and criticised, 
long for the penny number and the weekly 
woodcut ! 

Well, I know that glory now. I have tried 
and on the whole I have failed: just as Egan 
and Hemming failed in the circulating libraries. 
It is my consolation that Charles Reade nearly 
wrecked that valuable property the London 
Journal, which must instantly fall back on Mr. 
Egan; and the king of us all, George Meredith, 
once staggered the circulation of a weekly news- 
paper. A servant-maid used to come and boast 
when she had read another chapter of Treasure 
Island: that any pleasure should attend the 
exercise never crossed her thoughts. The same 



POPULAR AUTHORS 147 

tale, in a penny paper of a high class, was 
mighty coldly looked upon; by the delicate 
test of the correspondence column, I could see 
I was far to leeward; and there was one giant 
on the staff (a man with some talent, when he 
chose to use it) with whom I very early per- 
ceived it was in vain to rival. Yet I was thought 
well of on my penny paper for two reasons: 
one that the publisher was bent on raising the 
standard — a difficult enterprise in which he has 
to a great extent succeeded; the other, because 
(like Bracebridge Hemming) I was "a reliable 
author." For our great men of the dust are 
apt to be behind with copy, 

III 

How I came to be such a student of our 
penny press, demands perhaps some explana- 
tion. I was brought up on CasselVs Family 
Paper; but the lady who was kind enough to 
read the tales aloud to me was subject to sharp 
attacks of conscience. She took the Family 
Paper on confidence; the tales it contained being 
Family Tales, not novels. But every now and 
then, something would occur to alarm her 
finer sense; she would express a well-grounded 
fear that the current fiction was "going to turn 
out a Regular Novel"; and the family paper, 



i 4 8 LEARNING TO WRITE 

with my pious approval, would be dropped. 
Yet neither she nor I were wholly stoical; and 
when Saturday came round, we would study 
the windows of the stationer and try to fish out 
of subsequent woodcuts and their legends the 
further adventures of our favourites. Many 
points are here suggested for the casuist; 
definitions of the Regular Novel and the Fam- 
ily Tale are to be desired; and quite a paper 
might be written on the relative merit of read- 
ing a fiction outright and lusting after it at the 
stationer's window. The experience at least 
had a great effect upon my childhood. This 
inexpensive pleasure mastered me. Each new 
Saturday I would go from one newsvender's 
window to another's, till I was master of the 
weekly gallery and had thoroughly digested 
"The Baronet Unmasked," "So and so ap- 
proaching the Mysterious House," "The Dis- 
covery of the Dead Body in the Blue Marl 
Pit," "Dr. Vargas Removing the Senseless Body 
of Fair Lilias," and whatever other snatch of 
unknown story and glimpse of unknown char- 
acters that gallery afforded. I do not know 
that I ever enjoyed fiction more; those books 
that we have (in such a way) avoided reading, 
are all so excellently written! And in early 
years, we take a book for its material, and act 
as our own artists, keenly realising that which 



POPULAR AUTHORS 149 

pleases us, leaving the rest aside. I never sup- 
posed that a book was to command me until, one 
disastrous day of storm, the heaven full of tur- 
bulent vapours, the streets full of the squalling 
of the gale, the windows resounding under 
bucketfuls of rain, my mother read aloud to me 
Macbeth. I cannot say I thought the experi- 
ence agreeable; I far preferred the ditch-water 
stories that a child could dip and skip and doze 
over, stealing at times materials for play; it was 
something new and shocking to be thus ravished 
by a giant, and I shrank under the brutal grasp. 
But the spot in memory is still sensitive; nor do 
I ever read that tragedy but I hear the gale 
howling up the valley of the Leith. 

All this while, I would never buy upon my 
own account; pence were scarce, conscience 
busy; and I would study the pictures and dip 
into the exposed columns, but not buy. My 
fall was brought about by a truly romantic 
incident. Perhaps the reader knows Neidpath 
Castle, where it stands, bosomed in hills, on a 
green promontory; Tweed at its base running 
through all the gamut of a busy river, from the 
pouring shallow to the brown pool. In the 
days when I was thereabout, and that part of 
the earth was made a heaven to me by many 
things now lost, by boats, and bathing, and the 
fascination of streams, and the delights of 



i 5 o LEARNING TO WRITE 

comradeship, and those (surely the prettiest 
and simplest) of a boy and a girl romance — in 
those days of Arcady there dwelt in the upper 
story of the castle one whom I believe to have 
been gamekeeper on the estate. The rest of the 
place stood open to incursive urchins; and 
there, in a deserted chamber, we found some 
half-a-dozen numbers of Black Bess, or the 
Knight of the Road, a work by Edward Viles. 
So far as we were aware, no one had visited that 
chamber (which was in a turret) since Lambert 
blew in the doors of the fortress with con- 
tumelious English cannon. Yet it could hardly 
have been Lambert (in whatever hurry of mili- 
tary operations) who had left these samples of 
romance; and the idea that the gamekeeper 
had anything to do with them was one that we 
discouraged. Well, the offence is now covered 
by prescription; we took them away; and in 
the shade of a contiguous fir- wood, lying on 
blaeberries, I made my first acquaintance with 
the art of Mr. Viles. From this author, I passed 
on to Malcolm J. Errym (the name, to my 
present scrutiny, suggesting an anagram on 
Merry), author of Edith the Captive, The Trea- 
sures of St. Mark, A Mystery in Scarlet, George 
Barrington, Sea-drift, Townsend the Runner, and 
a variety of other well-named romances. Mem- 
ory may play me false, but I believe there was 



POPULAR AUTHORS 151 

a kind of merit about Errym. The Mystery in 
Scarlet runs in my mind to this day; and if 
any hunter after autographs (and I think the 
world is full of such) can lay his hands on a 
copy even imperfect, and will send it to me in 
the care of Messrs. Scribner, my gratitude (the 
muse consenting) will even drop into poetry. 
For I have a curiosity to know what the Mys- 
tery in Scarlet was, and to renew acquaintance 
with King George and his valet Norris, who 
were the chief figures in the work and may be 
said to have risen in every page superior to 
history and the ten commandments. Hence I 
passed on to Mr. Egan, whom I trust the 
reader does not confuse with the author of 
Tom and Jerry; the two are quite distinct, 
though I have sometimes suspected they were 
father and son. I never enjoyed Egan as I did 
Errym; but this was possibly a want of taste, 
and Egan would do. Thence again I was 
suddenly brought face to face with Mr. Rey- 
nolds. A school-fellow, acquainted with my 
debasing tastes, supplied me with The Mys- 
teries of London, and I fell back revolted. The 
same school-fellow (who seems to have been a 
devil of a fellow) supplied me about the same 
time with one of those contributions to litera- 
ture (and even to art) from which the name of 
the publisher is modestly withheld. It was a 



152 LEARNING TO WRITE 

far more respectable work than The Mysteries 
of London. J. F. Smith when I was a child, 
Errym when I was a boy, Hayward when I 
had attained to man's estate, these I read for 
pleasure; the others, down to Sylvanus Cobb, 
I have made it my business to know (as far as 
my endurance would support me) from a sin- 
cere interest in human nature and the art of 
letters. 

IV 

What kind of talent is required to please 
this mighty public? that was my first question, 
and was soon amended with the words, "if 
any." J. F. Smith was a man of undeniable 
talent, Errym and Hayward have a certain 
spirit, and even in Egan the very tender might 
recognise the rudiments of a sort of literary 
gift; but the cases on the other side are quite 
conclusive. Take Hemming, or the dull ruffian 
Reynolds, or Sylvanus Cobb, of whom perhaps 
I have only seen unfortunate examples — they 
seem not to have the talents of a rabbit, and 
why anyone should read them is a thing that 
passes wonder. A plain-spoken and possibly 
high-thinking critic might here perhaps return 
upon me with my own expressions. And he 
would have missed the point. For I and my 
fellows have no such popularity to be accounted 



POPULAR AUTHORS 153 

for. The reputation of an upper-class author 
is made for him at dinner-tables and nursed in 
newspaper paragraphs, and when all is done, 
amounts to no great matter. We call it popu- 
larity, surely in a pleasant error. A flippant 
writer in the Saturday Review expressed a doubt 
if I had ever cherished a " genteel" illusion; in 
truth I never had many, but this was one — 
and I have lost it. Once I took the literary au- 
thor at his own esteem; I behold him now like 
one of those gentlemen who read their own MS. 
descriptive poetry aloud to wife and babes 
around the evening hearth; addressing a mere 
parlour coterie and quite unknown to the great 
world outside the villa windows. At such 
pigmy reputation, Reynolds, or Cobb, or Mrs. 
Southworth can afford to smile. By spontane- 
ous public vote, at a cry from the unorganic 
masses, these great ones of the dust were 
laurelled. And for what? 

Ay, there is the question: For what? How 
is this great honour gained ? Many things have 
been suggested. The people (it has been said) 
like rapid narrative. If so, the taste is recent, 
for both Smith and Egan were leisurely writers. 
It has been said they like incident, not char- 
acter. I am not so sure. G. P. R. James was 
an upper-class author, J. F. Smith a penny- 
pressman; the two are in some ways not unlike; 



iS4 LEARNING TO WRITE 

but — here is the curiosity — James made far 
the better story, Smith was far the more suc- 
cessful with his characters. Each (to bring the 
parallel home) wrote a novel called The Step- 
mother; each introduced a pair of old maids; 
and let anyone study the result! James's 
Stepmother is a capital tale, but Smith's old 
maids are like Trollope at his best. It is said 
again that the people like crime. Certainly 
they do. But the great ones of the dust have 
no monopoly of that, and their less fortunate 
rivals hammer away at murder and abduction 
unapplauded. 

I return to linger about my seaman on the 
Atlantic liner. I shall be told he is exceptional. 
I am tempted to think, on the other hand, that 
he may be normal. The critical attitude, 
whether to books or life — how if that were the 
true exception? How if Tom Holt's Log, sur- 
reptitiously perused by a harbour-side, had been 
the means of sending my mariner to sea? How 
if he were still unconsciously expecting the 
Tom Holt part of the business to begin — per- 
haps to-morrow? How, even, if he had never 
yet awakened to the discrepancy between that 
singular picture and the facts? Let us take 
another instance. The Young Ladies' Journal is 
an elegant miscellany which I have frequently 
observed in the possession of the barmaid. In 



POPULAR AUTHORS 155 

a lone house on a moorland, I was once supplied 
with quite a considerable file of this production 
and (the weather being violent) devoutly read it. 
The tales were not ill done; they were well 
abreast of the average tale in a circulating li- 
brary; there was only one difference, only one 
thing to remind me I was in the land of penny 
numbers instead of the parish of three volumes: 
Disguise it as the authors pleased (and they 
showed ingenuity in doing so) it was always 
the same tale they must relate: the tale of a 
poor girl ultimately married to a peer of the 
realm or (at the worst) a baronet. The circum- 
stance is not common in life; but how familiar 
to the musings of the barmaid ! The tales were 
not true to what men see; they were true to 
what the readers dreamed. 

Let us try to remember how fancy works in 
children; with what selective partiality it reads, 
leaving often the bulk of the book unrealised, 
but fixing on the rest and living it; and what a 
passionate impotence it shows — what power of 
adoption, what weakness to create. It seems 
to be not much otherwise with uneducated 
readers. They long, not to enter into the lives 
of others, but to behold themselves in changed 
situations, ardently but impotently precon- 
ceived. The imagination (save the mark !) of 
the popular author here comes to the rescue, 



156 LEARNING TO WRITE 

supplies some body of circumstance to these 
phantom aspirations, and conducts the readers 
where they will. Where they will: that is the 
point; elsewhere they will not follow. When I 
was a child, if I came on a book in which the 
characters wore armour, it fell from my hand; 
I had no criterion of merit, simply that one 
decisive taste, that my fancy refused to linger 
in the middle ages. And the mind of the un- 
educated reader is mailed with similar restric- 
tions. So it is that we must account for a thing 
otherwise unaccountable; the popularity of 
some of these great ones of the dust. In de- 
fect of any other gift, they have instinctive 
sympathy with the popular mind. They can 
thus supply to the shop-girl and the shoe-black 
vesture cut to the pattern of their naked fancies, 
and furnish them with welcome scenery and 
properties for autobiographical romancing. 

Even in readers of an upper class, we may 
perceive the traces of a similar hesitation; even 
for them, a writer may be too exotic. The 
villain, even the heroine, may be a Feejee isl- 
ander, but only on condition the hero is one 
of ourselves. It is pretty to see the thing re- 
versed in the Arabian tale (Torrens or Burton — 
the tale is omitted in popular editions) where 
the Moslem hero carries off the Christian 
amazon; and in the exogamous romance, there 



POPULAR AUTHORS 157 

lies interred a good deal of human history and 
human nature. But the question of exogamy- 
is foreign to the purpose. Enough that we are 
not readily pleased without a character of our 
own race and language; so that, when the scene 
of a romance is laid on any distant soil, we look 
with eagerness and confidence for the coming 
of the English traveller. With the readers of 
the penny-press, the thing goes further. Burn- 
ing as they are to penetrate into the homes of 
the peerage, they must still be conducted there 
by some character of their own class, into whose 
person they cheerfully migrate for the time of 
reading. Hence the poor governesses supplied 
in the Young Ladies' Journal. Hence these 
dreary virtuous ouvriers and ouvrieres of Xavier 
de Montepin. He can do nothing with them; 
and he is far too clever not to be aware of that. 
When he writes for the Figaro, he discards these 
venerable puppets and doubtless glories in 
their absence; but so soon as he must address 
the great audience of the half-penny journal, 
out come the puppets, and are furbished up, 
and take to drink again, and are once more re- 
claimed, and once more falsely accused. See 
them for what they are — Montepin's decoys; 
without these he could not make his public feel 
at home in the houses of the fraudulent bankers 
and the wicked dukes. 



158 LEARNING TO WRITE 

The reader, it has been said, migrates into 
such characters for the time of reading; under 
their name escapes the narrow prison of the 
individual career, and sates his avidity for other 
lives. To what extent he ever emigrates again, 
and how far the fancied careers react upon 
the true one, it would fill another paper to de- 
bate. But the case of my sailor shows their 
grave importance. "Tom Holt does not apply 
to me/' thinks our dully-imaginative boy by 
the harbour-side, "for I am not a sailor. But 
if I go to sea it will apply completely." And 
he does go to sea. He lives surrounded by the 
fact, and does not observe it. He cannot real- 
ise, he cannot make a tale of his own life; which 
crumbles in discrete impressions even as he 
lives it, and slips between the fingers of his 
memory like sand. It is not this that he con- 
siders in his rare hours of rumination, but that 
other life, which was all lit up for him by the 
humble talent of a Hayward — that other life 
which, God knows, perhaps he still believes 
that he is leading— the life of Tom Holt. 



X 

SOME GENTLEMEN IN FICTION 

To make a character at all — so to select, so 
to describe a few acts, a few speeches, perhaps 
(though this is quite superfluous) a few details 
of physical appearance, as that these shall all 
cohere and strike in the reader's mind a com- 
mon note of personality — there is no more deli- 
cate enterprise, success is nowhere less compre- 
hensible than here. We meet a man, we find 
his talk to have been racy; and yet if every 
word were taken down by shorthand, we should 
stand amazed at its essential insignificance. 
Physical presence, the speaking eye, the in- 
imitable commentary of the voice, it was in 
these the spell resided; and these are all ex- 
cluded from the pages of the novel. There is 
one writer of fiction whom I have the advantage 
of knowing; and he confesses to me that his 
success in this matter (small though it be) is 
quite surprising to himself. "In one of my 
books," he writes, "and in one only, the char- 
acters took the bit in their mouth; all at once, 

Copyright, 1888, 1895, by Charles Scribner's Sons. 
159 



i6o LEARNING TO WRITE 

they became detached from the flat paper, they 
turned their backs on me and walked off bodily; 
and from that time, my task was stenographic — 
it was they who spoke, it was they who wrote 
the remainder of the story. When this miracle 
of genesis occurred, I was thrilled with joyous 
surprise; I felt a certain awe — shall we call it 
superstitious? And yet how small a miracle it 
was; with what a partial life were my char- 
acters endowed; and when all was said, how 
little did I know of them! It was a form of 
words that they supplied me with; it was in a 
form of words that they consisted; beyond and 
behind was nothing." The limitation, which 
this writer felt and which he seems to have 
deplored, can be remarked in the work of even 
literary princes. I think it was Hazlitt who 
declared that, if the names were dropped at 
press, he could restore any speech in Shakespeare 
to the proper speaker; and I dare say we could 
all pick out the words of Nym or Pistol, Caius 
or Evans; but not even Hazlitt could do the 
like for the great leading characters, who yet are 
cast in a more delicate mould, and appear before 
us far more subtly and far more fully differen- 
tiated, than these easy-going ventriloquial pup- 
pets. It is just when the obvious expedients of 
the barrel-organ vocabulary, the droll mispro- 
nunciation or the racy dialect, are laid aside, 



SOME GENTLEMEN IN FICTION 161 

that the true masterpieces are wrought (it 
would seem) from nothing. Hamlet speaks in 
character, I potently believe it, and yet see not 
how. He speaks at least as no man ever spoke 
in life, and very much as many other heroes do 
in the same volume; now uttering the noblest 
verse, now prose of the most cunning workman- 
ship; clothing his opinions throughout in that 
amazing dialect, Shakespearese. The opinions 
themselves, again, though they are true and 
forcible and reinforced with excellent images, are 
not peculiar either to Hamlet, or to any man or 
class or period; in their admirable generality of 
appeal resides their merit; they might figure, 
and they would be applauded, in almost any 
play and in the mouth of almost any noble and 
considerate character. The only hint that is 
given as to his physical man — I speak for myself 
— is merely shocking, seems merely erroneous, 
and is perhaps best explained away upon the 
theory that Shakespeare had Burbadge more 
directly in his eye than Hamlet. As for what 
the Prince does and what he refrains from do- 
ing, all acts and passions are strangely imper- 
sonal. A thousand characters, as different 
among themselves as night from day, should 
yet, under the like stress of circumstance, have 
trodden punctually in the footprints of Hamlet 
and each other. Have you read Andre Cor- 



162 LEARNING TO WRITE 

nelis ? in which M. Bourget handled over again 
but yesterday the theme of Hamlet, even as 
Godwin had already rehandled part of it in 
Caleb Williams. You can see the character M. 
Bourget means with quite sufficient clearness; 
it is not a masterpiece, but it is adequately in- 
dicated; and the character is proper to the 
part, these acts and passions fit him like a 
glove, he carries the tale, not with so good a 
grace as Hamlet, but with equal nature. Well, 
the two personalities are fundamentally dis- 
tinct: they breathe upon us out of different 
worlds; in face, in touch, in the subtile atmos- 
phere by which we recognise an individual, in 
all that goes to build up a character — or at 
least that shadowy thing, a character in a book 
— they are even opposed: the same fate involves 
them, they behave on the same lines, and they 
have not one hair in common. What, then, 
remains of Hamlet? and by what magic does 
he stand forth in our brains, teres atque rotundus, 
solid to the touch, a man to praise, to blame, to 
pity, ay, and to love? 

At bottom, what we hate or love is doubtless 
some projection of the author; the personal at- 
mosphere is doubtless his; and when we think 
we know Hamlet, we know but a side of his 
creator. It is a good old comfortable doctrine, 
which our fathers have taken for a pillow, which 



SOME GENTLEMEN IN FICTION 163 

has served as a cradle for ourselves; and yet, in 
some of its applications, it brings us face to face 
with difficulties. I said last month that we 
could tell a gentleman in a novel. Let us con- 
tinue to take Hamlet. Manners vary, they in- 
vert themselves, from age to age; Shakespeare's 
gentlemen are not quite ours, there is no doubt 
their talk would raise a flutter in a modern tea- 
party; but in the old pious phrase, they have 
the root of the matter. All the most beautiful 
traits of the gentleman adorn this character of 
Hamlet: it was the side on which Salvini seized, 
which he so attractively displayed, with which 
he led theatres captive; it is the side, I think, 
by which the Prince endears himself to readers. 
It is true there is one staggering scene, the great 
scene with his mother. But we must regard 
this as the author's lost battle; here it was that 
Shakespeare failed: what to do with the Queen, 
how to depict her, how to make Hamlet use 
her, these (as we know) were his miserable 
problem; it beat him, he faced it with an in- 
decision worthy of his hero; he shifted, he 
shuffled with it; in the end, he may be said to 
have left his paper blank. One reason why we 
do not more generally recognise this failure of 
Shakespeare's is because we have most of us 
seen the play performed; and managers, by 
what seems a stroke of art, by what is really 



164 LEARNING TO WRITE 

(I dare say) a fortunate necessity, smuggle the 
problem out of sight — the play, too, for the 
matter of that; but the glamour of the foot- 
lights and the charm of that little strip of 
fiddlers' heads and elbows, conceal the conjur- 
ing. This stroke of art (let me call it so) con- 
sists in casting the Queen as an old woman. 
Thanks to the footlights and the fiddlers' 
heads, we never pause to inquire why the King 
should have pawned his soul for this college- 
bedmaker in masquerade; and thanks to the 
absurdity of the whole position, and that un- 
conscious unchivalry of audiences (ay, and of 
authors also) to old women, Hamlet's mon- 
strous conduct passes unobserved or unresented. 
Were the Queen cast as she should be, a woman 
still young and beautiful, had she been coher- 
ently written by Shakespeare, and were she 
played with any spirit, even an audience would 
rise. 

But the scene is simply false, effective on the 
stage, untrue of any son or any mother; in 
judging the character of Hamlet, it must be 
left upon one side; and in all other relations we 
recognise the Prince for a gentleman. 

Now, if the personal charm of any verbal 
puppet be indeed only an emanation from its 
author, may we conclude, since we feel Hamlet 
to be a gentleman, that Shakespeare was one 



SOME GENTLEMEN IN FICTION 165 

too? An instructive parallel occurs. There 
were in England two writers of fiction, con- 
temporaries, rivals in fame, opposites in char- 
acter; one descended from a great house, easy, 
generous, witty, debauched, a favourite in the 
tap-room and the hunting field, yet withal a 
man of a high practical intelligence, a distin- 
guished public servant, an ornament of the 
bench: the other, sprung from I know not 
whence — but not from kings — buzzed about by 
second-rate women, and their fit companion, a 
tea-bibber in parlours, a man of painful pro- 
priety, with all the narrowness and much of 
the animosity of the backshop and the dissent- 
ing chapel. Take the pair, they seem like types: 
Fielding, with all his faults, was undeniably a 
gentleman; Richardson, with all his genius and 
his virtues, as undeniably was not. And now 
turn to their works. In Tom Jones, a novel of 
which the respectable profess that they could 
stand the dulness if it were not so blackguardly, 
and the more honest admit they could forgive 
the blackguardism if it were not so dull — in 
Tom Jones, with its voluminous bulk and 
troops of characters, there is no shadow of a 
gentleman, for Allworthy is only ink and 
paper. In Joseph Andrews, I fear I have al- 
ways confined my reading to the parson; and 
Mr. Adams, delightful as he is, has no pre- 



166 LEARNING TO WRITE 

tension "to the genteel." In Amelia, things 
get better; all things get better; it is one of the 
curiosities of literature that Fielding, who wrote 
one book that was engaging, truthful, kind, and 
clean, and another book that was dirty, dull, 
and false, should be spoken of, the world over, 
as the author of the second and not the first, as 
the author of Tom Jones, not of Amelia. And 
in Amelia, sure enough, we find some gentle- 
folk; Booth and Dr. Harrison will pass in a 
crowd, I dare not say they will do more. It is 
very differently that one must speak of Rich- 
ardson's creations. With Sir Charles Grandison 
I am unacquainted — there are many impedi- 
ments in this brief life of man; I have more than 
once, indeed, reconnoitred the first volume with 
a flying party, but always decided not to break 
ground before the place till my siege guns came 
up; and it's an odd thing — I have been all 
these years in the field, and that powerful ar- 
tillery is still miles in the rear. The day it 
overtakes me, Baron Gibbon's fortress shall 
be beat about his ears, and my flag be planted 
on the formidable ramparts of the second part 
of Faust. Clarendon, too — But why should I 
continue this confession? Let the reader take 
up the wondrous tale himself, and run over the 
books that he has tried, and failed withal, and 
vowed to try again, and now beholds, as he 



SOME GENTLEMEN IN FICTION 167 

goes about a library, with secret compunction. 
As to Sir Charles at least, I have the report of 
spies; and by the papers in the office of my In- 
telligence Department, it would seem he was a 
most accomplished baronet. I am the more 
ready to credit these reports, because the spies 
are persons thoroughly accustomed to the busi- 
ness; and because my own investigation of a 
kindred quarter of the globe {Clarissa Harlowe) 
has led me to set a high value on the Richard- 
sonians. Lovelace — in spite of his abominable 
misbehaviour — Colonel Morden and my Lord 

M are all gentlemen of undisputed quality. 

They more than pass muster, they excel; they 
have a gallant, a conspicuous carriage; they 
roll into the book, four in hand, in gracious at- 
titudes. The best of Fielding's gentlemen had 

scarce been at their ease in M Hall; Dr. 

Harrison had seemed a plain, honest man, a 
trifle below his company; and poor Booth (sup- 
posing him to have served in Colonel Morden's 
corps and to have travelled in the post-chaise 
along with his commandant) had been glad to 
slink away with Mowbray and crack a bottle in 
the butler's room. 

So that here, on the terms of our theory, we 
have an odd inversion, tempting to the cynic. 



168 LEARNING TO WRITE 



II 

Just the other day, there were again two 
rival novelists in England: Thackeray and 
Dickens; and the case of the last is, in this con- 
nection, full of interest. Here was a man and 
an artist, the most strenuous, one of the most 
endowed; and for how many years he laboured 
in vain to create a gentleman! With all his 
watchfulness of men and manners, with all his 
fiery industry, with his exquisite native gift of 
characterisation, with his clear knowledge of 
what he meant to do, there was yet something 
lacking. In part after part, novel after novel, 
a whole menagerie of characters, the good, the 
bad, the droll and the tragic, came at his beck 
like slaves about an oriental despot; there was 
only one who stayed away: the gentleman. If 
this ill fortune had persisted it might have 
shaken man's belief in art and industry. But 
years were given and courage was continued to 
the indefatigable artist; and at length, after so 
many and such lamentable failures, success be- 
gan to attend upon his arms. David Copper- 
field scrambled through on hands and knees; it 
was at least a negative success; and Dickens, 
keenly alive to all he did, must have heaved a 
sigh of infinite relief. Then came the evil days, 



SOME GENTLEMEN IN FICTION 169 

the days of Dombey and Dorrit, from which 
the lover of Dickens willingly averts his eyes; 
and when that temporary blight had passed 
away, and the artist began with a more reso- 
lute arm to reap the aftermath of his genius, we 
find him able to create a Carton, a Wrayburn, 
a Twemlow. No mistake about these three; 
they are all gentlemen: the sottish Carton, the 
effete Twemlow, the insolent Wrayburn, all 
have doubled the cape. 

There were never in any book three perfect 
sentences on end; there was never a character 
in any volume but it somewhere tripped. We 
are like dancing dogs and preaching women: 
the wonder is not that we should do it well, 
but that we should do it at all. And Wray- 
burn, I am free to admit, comes on one oc- 
casion to the dust. I mean, of course, the 
scene with the old Jew. I will make you a pres- 
ent of the Jew for a card-board figure; but that 
is neither here nor there: the ineffectuality of 
the one presentment does not mitigate the 
grossness, the baseness, the inhumanity of the 
other. In this scene, and in one other (if I re- 
member aright) where it is echoed, Wrayburn 
combines the wit of the omnibus-cad with the 
good feeling of the Andaman Islander: in all 
the remainder of the book, throughout a thou- 
sand perils, playing (you would say) with diffi- 



170 LEARNING TO WRITE 

culty, the author swimmingly steers his hero 
on the true course. The error stands by itself, 
and it is striking to observe the moment of its 
introduction. It follows immediately upon one 
of the most dramatic passages in fiction, that 
in which Bradley Headstone barks his knuckles 
on the church-yard wall. To handle Bradley 
(one of Dickens's superlative achievements) were 
a thing impossible to almost any man but his 
creator; and even to him, we may be sure, the 
effort was exhausting. Dickens was a weary 
man when he had barked the school-master's 
knuckles, a weary man and an excited; but the 
tale of bricks had to be finished, the monthly 
number waited; and under the false inspiration 
of irritated nerves, the scene of Wrayburn and 
the Jew was written and sent forth; and there 
it is, a blot upon the book and a buffet to the 
reader. 

I make no more account of this passage than 
of that other in Hamlet: a scene that has broken 
down, the judicious reader cancels for himself. 
And the general tenor of Wrayburn, and the 
whole of Carton and Twemlow, are beyond ex- 
ception. Here, then, we have a man who found 
it for years an enterprise beyond his art to 
draw a gentleman, and who in the end suc- 
ceeded. Is it because Dickens was not a gentle- 



SOME GENTLEMEN IN FICTION 171 

man himself that he so often failed? and if 
so, then how did he succeed at last? Is it be- 
cause he was a gentleman that he succeeded? 
and if so, what made him fail? I feel inclined 
to stop this paper here, after the maimer of 
conundrums, and offer a moderate reward for a 
solution. But the true answer lies probably 
deeper than did ever plummet sound. And 
mine (such as it is) will hardly appear to the 
reader to disturb the surface. 

These verbal puppets (so to call them once 
again) are things of a divided parentage: the 
breath of life may be an emanation from their 
maker, but they themselves are only strings of 
words and parts of books; they dwell in, they 
belong to, literature; convention, technical ar- 
tifice, technical gusto, the mechanical neces- 
sities of the art, these are the flesh and blood 
with which they are invested. If we look only at 
Carton and Wrayburn, both leading parts, it 
must strike us at once that both are most am- 
bitiously attempted; that Dickens was not con- 
tent to draw a hero and a gentleman plainly 
and quietly; that, after all his ill-success, he 
must still handicap himself upon these fresh 
adventures, and make Carton a sot, and some- 
times a cantankerous sot, and Wrayburn in- 
solent to the verge, and sometimes beyond the 



172 LEARNING TO WRITE 

verge, of what is pardonable. A moment's 
thought will show us this was in the nature of 
his genius, and a part of his literary method. 
His fierce intensity of design was not to be 
slaked with any academic portraiture; not all 
the arts of individualisation could perfectly 
content him; he must still seek something more 
definite and more express than nature. All 
artists, it may be properly argued, do the like; 
it is their method to discard the middling and 
the insignificant, to disengage the charactered 
and the precise. But it is only a class of artists 
that pursue so singly the note of personality; 
and is it not possible that such a preoccupation 
may disable men from representing gentlefolk? 
The gentleman passes in the stream of the 
day's manners, inconspicuous. The lover of the 
individual may find him scarce worth drawing. 
And even if he draw him, on what will his at- 
tention centre but just upon those points in 
which his model exceeds or falls short of his 
subdued ideal — but just upon those points in 
which the gentleman is not genteel? Dickens, 
in an hour of irritated nerves, and under the 
pressure of the monthly number, defaced his 
Wrayburn. Observe what he sacrifices. The 
ruling passion strong in his hour of weakness, 
he sacrifices dignity, decency, the essential 



SOME GENTLEMEN IN FICTION 173 

human beauties of his hero; he still preserves 
the dialect, the shrill note of personality, the 
mark of identification. Thackeray, under the 
strain of the same villainous system, would 
have fallen upon the other side; his gentleman 
would still have been a gentleman, he would 
have only ceased to be an individual figure. 

There are incompatible ambitions. You can- 
not paint a Vandyke and keep it a Franz Hals. 



Ill 

I have preferred to conclude my inconclu- 
sive argument before I touched on Thackeray. 
Personally, he scarce appeals to us as the ideal 
gentleman; if there were nothing else, per- 
petual nosing after snobbery at least suggests 
the snob; but about the men he made, there 
can be no such question of reserve. And whether 
because he was himself a gentleman in a very 
high degree, or because his methods were in a 
very high degree suited to this class of work, or 
from the common operation of both causes, a 
gentleman came from his pen by the gift of 
nature. He could draw him as a character 
part, full of pettiness, tainted with vulgarity, 
and yet still a gentleman, in the inimitable 
Major Pendennis. He could draw him as the 



i 7 4 LEARNING TO WRITE 

full-blown hero in Colonel Esmond. He could 
draw him — the next thing to the work of God 
— human and true and noble and frail, in Col- 
onel Newcome. If the art of being a gentle- 
man were forgotten, like the art of staining 
glass, it might be learned anew from that one 
character. It is learned there, I dare to say, 
daily. Mr. Andrew Lang, in a graceful attitude 
of melancholy, denies the influence of books. I 
think he forgets his philosophy; for surely there 
go two elements to the determination of con- 
duct: heredity, and experience — that which is 
given to us at birth, that which is added and 
cancelled in the course of life; and what experi- 
ence is more formative, what step of life is more 
efficient, than to know and weep for Colonel 
Newcome? And surely he forgets himself; for 
I call to mind other pages, beautiful pages, from 
which it may be gathered that the language of 
the Newcomes sings still in his memory, and its 
gospel is sometimes not forgotten. I call it a 
gospel: it is the best I know. Error and suffer- 
ing and failure and death, those calamities that 
our contemporaries paint upon so vast a scale 
— they are all depicted here, but in a more true 
proportion. We may return, before this pic- 
ture, to the simple and ancient faith. We may 
be sure (although we know not why) that we 



SOME GENTLEMEN IN FICTION 175 

give our lives, like coral insects, to build up in- 
sensibly, in the twilight of the seas of time, the 
reef of righteousness. And we may be sure 
(although we see not how) it is a thing worth 
doing. 



XI 

A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 

The past is all of one texture — whether 
feigned or suffered — whether acted out in three 
dimensions, or only witnessed in that small 
theatre of the brain which we keep brightly 
lighted all night long, after the jets are down, 
and darkness and sleep reign undisturbed in the 
remainder of the body. There is no distinction 
on the face of our experiences; one is vivid in- 
deed, and one dull, and one pleasant, and another 
agonising to remember; but which of them is 
what we call true, and which a dream, there is 
not one hair to prove. The past stands on a 
precarious footing; another straw split in the 
field of metaphysic, and behold us robbed of it. 
There is scarce a family that can count four 
generations but lays a claim to some dormant 
title or some castle and estate: a claim not 
prosecutable in any court of law, but flattering 
to the fancy and a great alleviation of idle 
hours. A man's claim to his own past is yet 
less valid. A paper might turn up (in proper 
story-book fashion) in the secret drawer of an 
176 



A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 177 

old ebony secretary, and restore your family to 
its ancient honours, and reinstate mine in a 
certain West Indian islet (not far from St. 
Kitt's, as beloved tradition hummed in my 
young ears) which was once ours, and is now 
unjustly someone else's, and for that matter 
(in the state of the sugar trade) is not worth 
anything to anybody. I do not say that these 
revolutions are likely; only no man can deny 
that they are possible; and the past, on the 
other hand, is lost forever: our old days and 
deeds, our old selves, too, and the very world in 
which these scenes were acted, all brought down 
to the same faint residuum as a last night's 
dream, to some incontinuous images, and an 
echo in the chambers of the brain. Not an 
hour, not a mood, not a glance of the eye, can 
we revoke; it is all gone, past conjuring. And 
yet conceive us robbed of it, conceive that little 
thread of memory that we trail behind us broken 
at the pocket's edge; and in what naked nullity 
should we be left ! for we only guide ourselves, 
and only know ourselves, by these air-painted 
pictures of the past. 

Upon these grounds, there are some among us 
who claimed to have lived longer and more 
richly than their neighbours; when they lay 
asleep they claim they were still active; and 
among the treasures of memory that all men 



178 LEARNING TO WRITE 

review for their amusement, these count in no 
second place the harvests of their dreams. 
There is one of this kind whom I have in my 
eye, and whose case is perhaps unusual enough 
to be described. He was from a child an ardent 
and uncomfortable dreamer. When he had a 
touch of fever at night, and the room swelled 
and shrank, and his clothes, hanging on a nail, 
now loomed up instant to the bigness of a 
church, and now drew away into a horror of 
infinite distance and infinite littleness, the poor 
soul was very well aware of what must follow, 
and struggled hard against the approaches of 
that slumber which was the beginning of sor- 
rows. But his struggles were in vain; sooner or 
later the night-hag would have him by the 
throat, and pluck him, strangling and scream- 
ing, from his sleep. His dreams were at times 
commonplace enough, at times very strange: at 
times they were almost formless, he would be 
haunted, for instance, by nothing more definite 
than a certain hue of brown, which he did not 
mind in the least while he' was awake, but 
feared and loathed while he was dreaming; at 
times, again, they took on every detail of cir- 
cumstance, as when once he supposed he must 
swallow the populous world, and awoke scream- 
ing with the horror of the thought. The two 
chief troubles of his very narrow existence— the 



A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 179 

practical and everyday trouble of school tasks 
and the ultimate and airy one of hell and judg- 
ment — were often confounded together into one 
appalling nightmare. He seemed to himself to 
stand before the Great White Throne; he was 
called on, poor little devil, to recite some form 
of words, on which his destiny depended; his 
tongue stuck, his memory was blank, hell gaped 
for him; and he would awake, clinging to the 
curtain-rod with his knees to his chin. 

These were extremely poor experiences, on the 
whole; and at that time of life my dreamer 
would have very willingly parted with his 
power of dreams. But presently, in the course 
of his growth, the cries and physical contortions 
passed away, seemingly forever; his visions 
were still for the most part miserable, but they 
were more constantly supported; and he would 
awake with no more extreme symptom than a 
flying heart, a freezing scalp, cold sweats, and 
the speechless midnight fear. His dreams, too, 
as befitted a mind better stocked with par- 
ticulars, became more circumstantial, and had 
more the air and continuity of life. The look 
of the world beginning to take hold on his at- 
tention, scenery came to play a part in his 
sleeping as well as in his waking thoughts, so 
that he would take long, uneventful journeys 
and see strange towns and beautiful places as 



180 LEARNING TO WRITE 

he lay in bed. And, what is more significant, 
an odd taste that he had for the Georgian cos- 
tume and for stories laid in that period of Eng- 
lish history, began to rule the features of his 
dreams; so that he masqueraded there in a 
three-cornered hat, and was much engaged 
with Jacobite conspiracy between the hour for 
bed and that for breakfast. About the same 
time, he began to read in his dreams — tales, for 
the most part, and for the most part after the 
manner of G. P. R. James, but so incredibly 
more vivid and moving than any printed book, 
that he has ever since been malcontent with 
literature. 

And then, while he was yet a student, there 
came to him a dream-adventure which he has 
no anxiety to repeat; he began, that is to say, 
to dream in sequence and thus to lead a double 
life — one of the day, one of the night — one that 
he had every reason to believe was the true 
one, another that he had no means of proving 
to be false. I should have said he studied, or 
was by way of studying, at Edinburgh College, 
which (it may be supposed) was how I came to 
know him. Well, in his dream life, he passed a 
long day in the surgical theatre, his heart in his 
mouth, his teeth on edge, seeing monstrous 
malformations and the abhorred dexterity of 
surgeons. In a heavy, rainy, foggy evening he 



A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 181 

came forth into the South Bridge, turned up the 
High Street, and entered the door of a tall land, 
at the top of which he supposed himself to lodge. 
All night long, in his wet clothes, he climbed the 
stairs, stair after stair in endless series, and at 
every second flight a flaring lamp with a re- 
flector. All night long, he brushed by single 
persons passing downward — beggarly women of 
the street, great, weary, muddy labourers, poor 
scarecrows of men, pale parodies of women — 
but all drowsy and weary like himself, and all 
single, and all brushing against him as they 
passed. In the end, out of a northern window, 
he would see day beginning to whiten over the 
Firth, give up the ascent, turn to descend, and 
in a breath be back again upon the streets, in 
his wet clothes, in the wet, haggard dawn, 
trudging to another day of monstrosities and 
operations. Time went quicker in the life of 
dreams, some seven hours (as near as he can 
guess) to one; and it went, besides, more in- 
tensely, so that the gloom of these fancied ex- 
periences clouded the day, and he had not 
shaken off their shadow ere it was time to lie 
down and to renew them. I cannot tell how 
long it was that he endured this discipline; but 
it was long enough to leave a great black blot 
upon his memory, long enough to send him, 
trembling for his reason, to the doors of a certain 



182 LEARNING TO WRITE 

doctor; whereupon with a simple draught he was 
restored to the common lot of man. 

The poor gentleman has since been troubled 
by nothing of the sort; indeed, his nights were 
for some while like other men's, now blank, now 
chequered with dreams, and these sometimes 
charming, sometimes appalling, but except for 
an occasional vividness, of no extraordinary 
kind. I will just note one of these occasions, 
ere I pass on to what makes my dreamer truly 
interesting. It seemed to him that he was in 
the first floor of a rough hill-farm. The room 
showed some poor efforts at gentility, a carpet 
on the floor, a piano, I think, against the wall; 
but, for all these refinements, there was no mis- 
taking he was in a moorland place, among 
hillside people, and set in miles of heather. He 
looked down from the window upon a bare 
farmyard, that seemed to have been long dis- 
used. A great, uneasy stillness lay upon the 
world. There was no sign of the farm-folk or 
of any live stock, save for an old, brown, curly 
dog of the retriever breed, who sat close in 
against the wall of the house and seemed to be 
dozing. Something about this dog disquieted 
the dreamer; it was quite a nameless feeling, for 
the beast looked right enough — indeed, he was 
so old and dull and dusty and broken-down, 
that he should rather have awakened pity; and 



A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 183 

yet the conviction came and grew upon the 
dreamer that this was no proper dog at all, but 
something hellish. A great many dozing sum- 
mer flies hummed about the yard; and presently 
the dog thrust forth his paw, caught a fly in his 
open palm, carried it to his mouth like an ape, 
and looking suddenly up at the dreamer in the 
window, winked to him with one eye. The 
dream went on, it matters not how it went; it 
was a good dream as dreams go; but there was 
nothing in the sequel worthy of that devilish 
brown dog. And the point of interest for me 
lies partly in that very fact: that having found 
so singular an incident, my imperfect dreamer 
should prove unable to carry the tale to a fit 
end and fall back on indescribable noises and 
indiscriminate horrors. It would be different 
now; he knows his business better ! 

For, to approach at last the point: This hon- 
est fellow had long been in the custom of set- 
ting himself to sleep with tales, and so had his 
father before him; but these were irresponsible 
inventions, told for the teller's pleasure, with 
no eye to the crass public or the thwart reviewer: 
tales where a thread might be dropped, or one 
adventure quitted for another, on fancy's least 
suggestion. So that the little people who man- 
age man's internal theatre had not as yet re- 
ceived a very rigorous training; and played 



184 LEARNING TO WRITE 

upon their stage like children who should have 
slipped into the house and found it empty, 
rather than like drilled actors performing a set 
piece to a huge hall of faces. But presently my 
dreamer began to turn his former amusement 
of story- telling to (what is called) account; by 
which I mean that he began to write and sell 
his tales. Here was he, and here were the little 
people who did that part of his business, in 
quite new conditions. The stories must now 
be trimmed and pared and set upon all fours, 
they must run from a beginning to an end and 
fit (after a manner) with the laws of life; the 
pleasure, in one word, had become a business; 
and that not only for the dreamer, but for the 
little people of his theatre. These understood 
the change as well as he. When he lay down to 
prepare himself for sleep, he no longer sought 
amusement, but printable and profitable tales; 
and after he had dozed off in his box-seat, his 
little people continued their evolutions with the 
same mercantile designs. All other forms of 
dream deserted him but two: he still occasion- 
ally reads the most delightful books, he still 
visits at times the most delightful places; and 
it is perhaps worthy of note that to these same 
places, and to one in particular, he returns at 
intervals of months and years, finding new 
field-paths, visiting new neighbours, beholding 



A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 185 

that happy valley under new effects of noon and 
dawn and sunset. But all the rest of the family 
of visions is quite lost to him: the common, 
mangled version of yesterday's affairs, the raw- 
head-and-bloody-bones nightmare, rumoured to 
be the child of toasted cheese — these and their 
like are gone; and, for the most part, whether 
awake or asleep, he is simply occupied — he or 
his little people — in consciously making stories 
for the market. This dreamer (like many other 
persons) has encountered some trifling vicissi- 
tudes of fortune. When the bank begins to send 
letters and the butcher to linger at the back 
gate, he sets to belabouring his brains after a 
story, for that is his readiest money- winner; and, 
behold ! at once the little people begin to bestir 
themselves in the same quest, and labour all 
night long, and all night long set before him 
truncheons of tales upon their lighted theatre. 
No fear of his being frightened now; the flying 
heart and the frozen scalp are things bygone; 
applause, growing applause, growing interest, 
growing exultation in his own cleverness (for 
he takes all the credit), and at last a jubilant 
leap to wakefulness, with the cry, "I have it, 
that'll do !" upon his lips: with such and similar 
emotions he sits at these nocturnal dramas, 
with such outbreaks, like Claudius in the play, 
he scatters the performance in the midst. Often 



186 LEARNING TO WRITE 

enough the waking is a disappointment: he has 
been too deep asleep, as I explain the thing; 
drowsiness has gained his little people, they 
have gone stumbling and maundering through 
their parts; and the play, to the awakened mind, 
is seen to be a tissue of absurdities. And yet 
how often have these sleepless Brownies done 
him honest service, and given him, as he sat 
idly taking his pleasure in the boxes, better 
tales than he could fashion for himself. 

Here is one, exactly as it came to him. It 
seemed he was the son of a very rich and 
wicked man, the owner of broad acres and a 
most damnable temper. The dreamer (and 
that was the son) had lived much abroad, on 
purpose to avoid his parent; and when at length 
he returned to England, it was to find him 
married again to a young wife, who was sup- 
posed to suffer cruelly and to loathe her yoke. 
Because of this marriage (as the dreamer in- 
distinctly understood) it was desirable for 
father and son to have a meeting; and yet both 
being proud and both angry, neither would con- 
descend upon a visit. Meet they did accord- 
ingly, in a desolate, sandy country by the sea; 
and there they quarrelled, and the son, stung by 
some intolerable insult, struck down the father 
dead. No suspicion was aroused; the dead 
man was found and buried, and the dreamer 



A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 187 

succeeded to the broad estates, and found him- 
self installed under the same roof with his 
father's widow, for whom no provision had been 
made. These two lived very much alone, as 
people may after a bereavement, sat down to 
table together, shared the long evenings, and 
grew daily better friends; until it seemed to 
him of a sudden that she was prying about 
dangerous matters, that she had conceived a 
notion of his guilt, that she watched him and 
tried him with questions. He drew back from 
her company as men draw back from a precipice 
suddenly discovered; and yet so strong was the 
attraction that he would drift again and again 
into the old intimacy, and again and again be 
startled back by some suggestive question or 
some inexplicable meaning in her eye. So they 
lived at cross purposes, a life full of broken 
dialogue, challenging glances, and suppressed 
passion; until, one day, he saw the woman 
slipping from the house in a veil, followed her 
to the station, followed her in the train to the 
seaside country, and out over the sandhills to 
the very place where the murder was done. 
There she began to grope among the bents, he 
watching her, flat upon his face; and presently 
she had something in her hand — I cannot re- 
member what it was, but it was deadly evidence 
against the dreamer — and as she held it up to 



188 LEARNING TO WRITE 

look at it, perhaps from the shock of the dis- 
covery, her foot slipped, and she hung at some 
peril on the brink of the tall sand- wreaths. He 
had no thought but to spring up and rescue 
her; and there they stood face to face, she with 
that deadly matter openly in her hand — his 
very presence on the spot another link of 
proof. It was plain she was about to speak, 
but this was more than he could bear — he could 
bear to be lost, but not to talk of it with his 
destroyer; and he cut her short with trivial 
conversation. Arm in arm, they returned to- 
gether to the train, talking he knew not what, 
made the journey back in the same carriage, 
sat down to dinner, and passed the evening in 
the drawing-room as in the past. But suspense 
and fear drummed in the dreamer's bosom. 
"She has not denounced me yet" — so his 
thoughts ran — "when will she denounce me? 
Will it be to-morrow?" And it was not to- 
morrow, nor the next day, nor the next; and 
their life settled back on the old terms, only 
that she seemed kinder than before, and that, 
as for him, the burthen of his suspense and 
wonder grew daily more unbearable, so that he 
wasted away like a man with a disease. Once, 
indeed, he broke all bounds of decency, seized 
an occasion when she was abroad, ransacked 
her room, and at last, hidden away among her 



A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 189 

jewels, found the damning evidence. There he 
stood, holding this thing, which was his life, 
in the hollow of his hand, and marvelling at 
her inconsequent behaviour, that she should 
seek, and keep, and yet not use it; and then the 
door opened, and behold herself. So, once 
more, they stood, eye to eye, with the evidence 
between them; and once more she raised to 
him a face brimming with some communication; 
and once more he shied away from speech and 
cut her off. But before he left the room, which 
he had turned upside down, he laid back his 
death-warrant where he had found it; and at 
that, her face lighted up. The next thing he 
heard, she was explaining to her maid, with 
some ingenious falsehood, the disorder of her 
things. Flesh and blood could bear the strain 
no longer; and I think it was the next morning 
(though chronology is always hazy in the thea- 
tre of the mind) that he burst from his reserve. 
They had been breakfasting together in one 
corner of a great, parqueted, sparely-furnished 
room of many windows; all the time of the meal 
she had tortured him with sly allusions; and no 
sooner were the servants gone, and these two 
protagonists alone together, than he leaped to 
his feet. She too sprang up, with a pale face; 
with a pale face, she heard him as he raved out 
his complaint: Why did she torture him so? 



i 9 o LEARNING TO WRITE 

she knew all, she knew he was no enemy to her; 
why did she not denounce him at once ? what 
signified her whole behaviour ? why did she tor- 
ture him? and yet again, why did she torture 
him? And when he had done, she fell upon her 
knees, and with outstretched hands: "Do you 
not understand?" she cried. "I love you!" 

Hereupon, with a pang of wonder and mer- 
cantile delight, the dreamer awoke. His mer- 
cantile delight was not of long endurance; for 
it soon became plain that in this spirited tale 
there were unmarketable elements; which is 
just the reason why you have it here so briefly 
told. But his wonder has still kept growing; 
and I think the reader's will also, if he con- 
sider it ripely. For now he sees why I speak 
of the little people as of substantive inventors 
and performers. To the end they had kept 
their secret. I will go bail for the dreamer 
(having excellent grounds for valuing his can- 
dour) that he had no guess whatever at the 
motive of the woman — the hinge of the whole 
well-invented plot — until the instant of thai: 
highly dramatic declaration. It was not his 
tale; it was the little people's! And observe: 
not only was the secret kept, the story was told 
with really guileful craftsmanship. The con- 
duct of both actors is (in the cant phrase) 
psychologically correct, and the emotion aptly 



A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 191 

graduated up to the surprising climax. I am 
awake now, and I know this trade; and yet I 
cannot better it. I am awake, and I live by this 
business; and yet I could not outdo — could not 
perhaps equal — that crafty artifice (as of some 
old, experienced carpenter of plays, some Den- 
nery or Sardou) by which the same situation is 
twice presented and the two actors twice 
brought face to face over the evidence, only 
once it is in her hand, once in his — and these 
in their due order, the least dramatic first. 
The more I think of it, the more I am moved 
to press upon the world my question: Who are 
the Little People? They are near connections 
of the dreamer's, beyond doubt; they share in 
his financial worries and have an eye to the 
bank-book; they share plainly in his training; 
they have plainly learned like him to build the 
scheme of a considerate story and to arrange 
emotion in progressive order; only I think they 
have more talent; and one thing is beyond 
doubt, they can tell him a story piece by piece, 
like a serial, and keep him all the while in igno- 
rance of where they aim. Who are they, then? 
and who is the dreamer? 

Well, as regards the dreamer, I can answer 
that, for he is no less a person than myself; — 
as I might have told you from the beginning, 
only that the critics murmur over my consis- 



i 9 2 LEARNING TO WRITE 

tent egotism; — and as I am positively forced 
to tell you now, or I could advance but little 
farther with my story. And for the Little Peo- 
ple, what shall I say they are but just my 
Brownies, God bless them! who do one-half 
my work for me while I am fast asleep, and in 
all human likelihood, do the rest for me as 
well, when I am wide awake and fondly suppose 
I do it for myself. That part which is done 
while I am sleeping is the Brownies' part be- 
yond contention; but that which is done when 
I am up and about is by no means necessarily 
mine, since all goes to show the Brownies have 
a hand in it even then. Here is a doubt that 
much concerns my conscience. For myself — 
what I call I, my conscience ego, the denizen 
of the pineal gland unless he has changed his 
residence since Descartes, the man with the con- 
science and the variable bank-account, the man 
with the hat and the boots, and the privilege of 
voting and not carrying his candidate at the 
general elections — I am sometimes tempted to 
suppose he is no story-teller at all, but a crea- 
ture as matter of fact as any cheesemonger or 
any cheese, and a realist bemired up to the ears 
in actuality; so that, by that account, the whole 
of my published fiction should be the single- 
handed product of some Brownie, some Familiar, 
some unseen collaborator, whom I keep locked 



A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 193 

in a back garret, while I get all the praise and 
he but a share (which I cannot prevent him 
getting) of the pudding. I am an excellent 
adviser, something like Moliere's servant; I pull 
back and I cut down; and I dress the whole in 
the best words and sentences that I can find 
and make; I hold the pen, too; and I do the 
sitting at the table, which is about the worst of 
it; and when all is done, I make up the manu- 
script and pay for the registration; so that, on 
the whole, I have some claim to share, though 
not so largely as I do, in the profits of our com- 
mon enterprise. 

I can but give an instance or so of what part 
is done sleeping and what part awake, and 
leave the reader to share what laurels there 
are, at his own nod, between myself and my 
collaborators; and to do this I will first take a 
book that a number of persons have been polite 
enough to read, the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll 
and Mr. Hyde. I had long been trying to write 
a story on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle, 
for that strong sense of man's double being 
which must at times come in upon and over- 
whelm the mind of every thinking creature. I 
had even written one, The Travelling Compan- 
ion, which was returned by an editor on the 
plea that it was a work of genius and indecent, 
and which I burned the other day on the ground 



i 9 4 LEARNING TO WRITE 

that it was not a work of genius, and that Jekyll 
had supplanted it. Then came one of those 
financial fluctuations to which (with an elegant 
modesty) I have hitherto referred in the third 
person. For two days I went about racking my 
brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second 
night I dreamed the scene at the window, and 
a scene afterwards split in two, in which Hyde, 
pursued for some crime, took the powder and 
underwent the change in the presence of his 
pursuers. All the rest was made awake, and 
consciously, although I think I can trace in 
much of it the manner of my Brownies. The 
meaning of the tale is therefore mine, and had 
long pre-existed in my garden of Adonis, and 
tried one body after another in vain; indeed, I 
do most of the morality, worse luck ! and my 
Brownies have not a rudiment of what we call 
a conscience. Mine, too, is the setting, mine 
the characters. All that was given me was the 
matter of three scenes, and the central idea of a 
voluntary change becoming involuntary. Will 
it be thought ungenerous, after I have been so 
liberally ladling out praise to my unseen col- 
laborators, if I here toss them over, bound 
hand and foot, into the arena of the critics ? For 
the business of the powders, which so many 
have censured, is, I am relieved to say, not 
mine at all but the Brownies'. Of another tale, 



A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 195 

in case the reader should have glanced at it, 
I may say a word : the not very defensible story 
of Olalla. Here the court, the mother, the 
mother's niche, Olalla, Olalla's chamber, the 
meetings on the stair, the broken window, the 
ugly scene of the bite, were all given me in bulk 
and detail as I have tried to write them; to 
this I added only the external scenery (for in 
my dream I never was beyond the court), the 
portrait, the characters of Felipe and the 
priest, the moral, such as it is, and the last 
pages, such as, alas ! they are. And I may even 
say that in this case the moral itself was given 
me; for it arose immediately on a comparison 
of the mother and the daughter, and from the 
hideous trick of atavism in the first. Sometimes 
a parabolic sense is still more undeniably pres- 
ent in a dream; sometimes I cannot but suppose 
my Brownies have been aping Bunyan, and yet 
in no case with what would possibly be called a 
moral in a tract; never with the ethical narrow- 
ness; conveying hints instead of life's larger 
limitations and that sort of sense which we 
seem to perceive in the arabesque of time and 
space. 

For the most part, it will be seen, my Brownies 
are somewhat fantastic, like their stories hot 
and hot, full of passion and the picturesque, 
alive with animating incident; and they have 



196 LEARNING TO WRITE 

no prejudice against the supernatural. But the 
other day they gave me a surprise, entertaining 
me with a love-story, a little April comedy, 
which I ought certainly to hand over to the au- 
thor of A Chance Acquaintance, for he could 
write it as it should be written, and I am sure 
(although I mean to try) that I cannot. — But 
who would have supposed that a Brownie of 
mine should invent a tale for Mr. Howells? 



XII 

ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF 
STYLE IN LITERATURE * 

There is nothing more disenchanting to man 
than to be shown the springs and mechanism of 
any art. All our arts and occupations lie wholly 
on the surface; it is on the surface that we per- 
ceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; 
and to pry below is to be appalled by their 
emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of 
the strings and pulleys. In a similar way, 
psychology itself, when pushed to any nicety, 
discovers an abhorrent baldness, but rather 
from the fault of our analysis than from any 
poverty native to the mind. And perhaps in 
aesthetics the reason is the same: those dis- 
closures which seem fatal to the dignity of art 
seem so perhaps only in the proportion of our 
ignorance; and those conscious and uncon- 
scious artifices which it seems unworthy of the 
serious artist to employ were yet, if we had the 
power to trace them to their springs, indications 

* First published in the Contemporary Review, April, 
1885. 

197 



198 LEARNING TO WRITE 

of a delicacy of the sense finer than we conceive, 
and hints of ancient harmonies in nature. This 
ignorance at least is largely irremediable. We 
shall never learn the affinities of beauty, for 
they lie too deep in nature and too far back in 
the mysterious history of man. The amateur, 
in consequence, will always grudgingly receive 
details of method, which can be stated but 
never ca*n wholly be explained; nay, on the 
principle laid down in "Hudibras," that 

"Still the less they understand, 
The more they admire the sleight-of-hand," 

many are conscious at each new disclosure of a 
diminution in the ardour of their pleasure. I 
must therefore warn that well-known character, 
the general reader, that I am here embarked 
upon a most distasteful business: taking down 
the picture from the wall and looking on the 
back; and, like the inquiring child, pulling the 
musical cart to pieces. 

i. Choice of Words. — The art of literature 
stands apart from among its sisters, because the 
material in which the literary artist works is the 
dialect of life; hence, on the one hand, a strange 
freshness and immediacy of address to the public 
mind, which is ready prepared to understand 
it; but hence, on the other, a singular limitation. 



ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 199 

The sister arts enjoy the use of a plastic and 
ductile material, like the modeller's clay; litera- 
ture alone is condemned to work in mosaic with 
finite and quite rigid words. You have seen 
these blocks, dear to the nursery: this one a 
pillar, that a pediment, a third a window or a 
vase. It is with blocks of just such arbitrary 
size and figure that the literary architect is con- 
demned to design the palace of his art. Nor 
is this all; for since these blocks, or words, are 
the acknowledged currency of our daily affairs, 
there are here possible none of those suppres- 
sions by which other arts obtain relief, con- 
tinuity, and vigour: no hieroglyphic touch, no 
smoothed impasto, no inscrutable shadow, as 
in painting; no blank wall, as in architecture; 
but every word, phrase, sentence, and para- 
graph must move in a logical progression, and 
convey a definite conventional import. 

Now the first merit which attracts in the 
pages of a good writer, or the talk of a brilliant 
conversationalist, is the apt choice and contrast 
of the words employed. It is, indeed, a strange 
art to take these blocks, rudely conceived for 
the purpose of the market or the bar, and by 
tact of application touch them to the finest 
meanings and distinctions, restore to them 
their primal energy, wittily shift them to an- 
other issue, or make of them a drum to rouse 



2oo LEARNING TO WRITE 

the passions. But though this form of merit is 
without doubt the most sensible and seizing, 
it is far from being equally present in all writers. 
The effect of words in Shakespeare, their singular 
justice, significance, and poetic charm, is dif- 
ferent, indeed, from the effect of words in Ad- 
dison or Fielding. Or, to take an example 
nearer home, the words in Carlyle seem elec- 
trified into an energy of lineament, like the 
faces of men furiously moved; whilst the words 
in Macaulay, apt enough to convey his meaning, 
harmonious enough in sound, yet glide from the 
memory like undistinguished elements in a 
general effect. But the first class of writers 
have no monopoly of literary merit. There is a 
sense in which Addison is superior to Carlyle; 
a sense in which Cicero is better than Tacitus, 
in which Voltaire excels Montaigne: it certainly 
lies not in the choice of words; it lies not in the 
interest or value of the matter; it lies not in 
force of intellect, of poetry, or of humour. The 
three first are but infants to the three second; 
and yet each, in a particular point of literary 
art, excels his superior in the whole. What is 
that point? 

2. The Web. — Literature, although it stands 
apart by reason of the great destiny and gen- 
eral use of its medium in the affairs of men, is 
yet an art like other arts. Of these we may dis- 



ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 201 

tinguish two great classes: those arts, like sculp- 
ture, painting, acting, which are representa- 
tive, or, as used to be said very clumsily, 
imitative; and those, like architecture, music, 
and the dance, which are self-sufficient, and 
merely presentative. Each class, in right of this 
distinction, obeys principles apart; yet both 
may claim a common ground of existence, and 
it may be said with sufficient justice that the 
motive and end of any art whatever is to make 
a pattern; a pattern, it may be, of colours, of 
sounds, of changing attitudes, geometrical fig- 
ures, or imitative lines; but still a pattern. 
That is the plane on which these sisters meet; 
it is by this that they are arts; and if it be well 
they should at times forget their childish origin, 
addressing their intelligence to virile tasks, and 
performing unconsciously that necessary func- 
tion of their life, to make a pattern, it is still 
imperative that the pattern shall be made. 

Music and literature, the two temporal arts, 
contrive their pattern of sounds in time; or, in 
other words, of sounds and pauses. Communica- 
tion may be made in broken words, the business 
of life be carried on with substantives alone; 
but that is not what we call literature; and the 
true business of the literary artist is to plait or 
weave his meaning, involving it around itself; 
so that each sentence, by successive phrases, 



202 LEARNING TO WRITE 

shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, 
after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and 
clear itself. In every properly constructed sen- 
tence there should be observed this knot or 
hitch; so that (however delicately) we are led 
to foresee, to expect, and then to welcome the 
successive phrases. The pleasure may be 
heightened by an element of surprise, as, very 
grossly, in the common figure of the antithesis, 
or, with much greater subtlety, where an antith- 
esis is first suggested and then deftly evaded. 
Each phrase, besides, is to be comely in itself; 
and between the implication and the evolution 
of the sentence there should be a satisfying 
equipoise of sound; for nothing more often dis- 
appoints the ear than a sentence solemnly and 
sonorously prepared, and hastily and weakly 
finished. Nor should the balance be too strik- 
ing and exact, for the one rule is to be infinitely 
various; to interest, to disappoint, to surprise, 
and yet still to gratify; to be ever changing, as 
it were, the stitch, and yet still to give the effect 
of an ingenious neatness. 

The conjurer juggles with two oranges, and 
our pleasure in beholding him springs from 
this, that neither is for an instant overlooked 
or sacrificed. So with the writer. His pattern, 
which is to please the supersensual ear, is yet 
addressed, throughout and first of all, to the 



ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 203 

demands of logic. Whatever be the obscur- 
ities, whatever the intricacies of the argument, 
the neatness of the fabric must not suffer, or the 
artist has been proved unequal to his design. 
And, on the other hand, no form of words must 
be selected, no knot must be tied among the 
phrases, unless knot and word be precisely what 
is wanted to forward and illuminate the argu- 
ment; for to fail in this is to swindle in the game. 
The genius of prose rejects the chevitte no less 
emphatically than the laws of verse; and the 
chevitte } I should perhaps explain to some of my 
readers, is any meaningless or very watered 
phrase employed to strike a balance in the 
sound. Pattern and argument live in each 
other; and it is by the brevity, clearness, charm, 
or emphasis of the second, that we judge the 
strength and fitness of the first. 

Style is synthetic; and the artist, seeking, so 
to speak, a peg to plait about, takes up at once 
two or more elements or two or more views of 
the subject in hand; combines, implicates, and 
contrasts them; and while, in one sense, he was 
merely seeking an occasion for the necessary 
knot, he will be found, in the other, to have 
greatly enriched the meaning, or to have trans- 
acted the work of two sentences in the space 
of one. In the change from the successive shal- 
low statements of the old chronicler to the 



2o 4 LEARNING TO WRITE 

dense and luminous flow of highly synthetic 
narrative, there is implied a vast amount of 
both philosophy and wit. The philosophy we 
clearly see, recognising in the synthetic writer a 
far more deep and stimulating view of life, and 
a far keener sense of the generation and affin- 
ity of events. The wit we might imagine to be 
lost; but it is not so, for it is just that wit, these 
perpetual nice contrivances, these difficulties 
overcome, this double purpose attained, these 
two oranges kept simultaneously dancing in the 
air, that, consciously or not, afford the reader 
his delight. Nay, and this wit, so little recog- 
nised, is the necessary organ of that philosophy 
which we so much admire. That style is there- 
fore the most perfect, not, as fools say, which 
is the most natural, for the most natural is the 
disjointed babble of the chronicler; but which 
attains the highest degree of elegant and preg- 
nant implication unobtrusively; or if obtru- 
sively, then with the greatest gain to sense and 
vigour. Even the derangement of the phrases 
from their (so-called) natural order is luminous 
for the mind; and it is by the means of such de- 
signed reversal that the elements of a judgment 
may be most pertinently marshalled, or the 
stages of a complicated action most perspicu- 
ously bound into one. 
The web, then, or the pattern: a web at once 



ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 205 

sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant 
texture: that is style, that is the foundation of 
the art of literature. Books indeed continue to 
be read, for the interest of the fact or fable, in 
which this quality is poorly represented, but 
still it will be there. And, on the other hand, 
how many do we continue to peruse and re- 
peruse with pleasure whose only merit is the 
elegance of texture? I am tempted to mention 
Cicero; and since Mr. Anthony Trollope is dead, 
I will. It is a poor diet for the mind, a very 
colourless and toothless " criticism of life"; but 
we enjoy the pleasure of a most intricate and 
dexterous pattern, every stitch a model at once 
of elegance and of good sense; and the two 
oranges, even if one of them be rotten, kept 
dancing with inimitable grace. 

Up to this moment I have had my eye mainly 
upon prose; for though in verse also the implica- 
tion of the logical texture is a crowning beauty, 
yet in verse it may be dispensed with. You 
would think that here was a death-blow to all 
I have been saying; and far from that, it is but a 
new illustration of the principle involved. For 
if the versifier is not bound to weave a pattern 
of his own, it is because another pattern has 
been formally imposed upon him by the laws 
of verse. For that is the essence of a prosody. 
Verse may be rhythmical; it may be merely 



206 LEARNING TO WRITE 

alliterative; it may, like the French, depend 
wholly on the (quasi) regular recurrence of the 
rhyme; or, like the Hebrew, it may consist in 
the strangely fanciful device of repeating the 
same idea. It does not matter on what principle 
the law is based, so it be a law. It may be pure 
convention; it may have no inherent beauty; 
all that we have a right to ask of any prosody 
is, that it shall lay down a pattern for the 
writer, and that what it lays down shall be 
neither too easy nor too hard. Hence it comes 
that it is much easier for men of equal facility 
to write fairly pleasing verse than reasonably 
interesting prose; for in prose the pattern it- 
self has to be invented, and the difficulties first 
created before they can be solved. Hence, 
again, there follows the peculiar greatness of the 
true versifier: such as Shakespeare, Milton, and 
Victor Hugo, whom I place beside them as 
versifier merely, not as poet. These not only 
knit and knot the logical texture of the style 
with all the dexterity and strength of prose; 
they not only fill up the pattern of the verse 
with infinite variety and sober wit; but they 
give us, besides, a rare and special pleasure, by 
the art, comparable to that of counterpoint, 
with which they follow at the same time, and 
now contrast, and now combine, the double 
pattern of the texture and the verse. Here the 



ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 207 

sounding line concludes; a little further on, the 
well-knit sentence; and yet a little further, and 
both will reach their solution on the same ring- 
ing syllable. The best that can be offered by the 
best writer of prose is to show us the develop- 
ment of the idea and the stylistic pattern pro- 
ceed hand in hand, sometimes by an obvious and 
triumphant effort, sometimes with a great air 
of ease and nature. The writer of verse, by 
virtue of conquering another difficulty, delights 
us with a new series of triumphs. He follows 
three purposes where his rival followed only 
two; and the change is of precisely the same na- 
ture as that from melody to harmony. Or if 
you prefer to return to the juggler, behold him 
now, to the vastly increased enthusiasm of the 
spectators, juggling with three oranges instead 
of two. Thus it is: added difficulty, added 
beauty; and the pattern, with every fresh ele- 
ment, becoming more interesting in itself. 

Yet it must not be thought that verse is 
simply an addition; something is lost as well as 
something gained; and there remains plainly 
traceable, in comparing the best prose with the 
best verse, a certain broad distinction of method 
in the web. Tight as the versifier may draw 
the knot of logic, yet for the ear he still leaves 
the tissue of the sentence floating somewhat 
loose. In prose, the sentence turns upon a pivot, 



208 LEARNING TO WRITE 

nicely balanced, and fits into itself with an 
obtrusive neatness like a puzzle. The ear re- 
marks and is singly gratified by this return and 
balance; while in verse it is all diverted to the 
measure. To find comparable passages is hard; 
for either the versifier is hugely the superior of 
the rival, or, if he be not, and still persist in his 
more delicate enterprise, he fails to be as widely 
his inferior. But let us select them from the 
pages of the same writer, one who was am- 
bidexter; let us take, for instance, Rumour's 
Prologue to the Second Part of Henry IV., a 
fine flourish of eloquence in Shakespeare's sec- 
ond manner, and set it side by side with Fal- 
staff's praise of sherris, act iv. scene i.; or let 
us compare the beautiful prose spoken through- 
out by Rosalind and Orlando; compare, for ex- 
ample, the first speech of all, Orlando's speech 
to Adam, with what passage it shall please you 
to select — the Seven Ages from the same play, 
or even such a stave of nobility as Othello's 
farewell to war; and still you will be able to per- 
ceive, if you have an ear for that class of music, 
a certain superior degree of organisation in the 
prose; a compacter fitting of the parts; a bal- 
ance in the swing and the return as of a throb- 
bing pendulum. We must not, in things tem- 
poral, take from those who have little, the little 



ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 209 

that they have; the merits of prose are inferior, 
but they are not the same; it is a little kingdom, 
but an independent. 

3. Rhythm of the Phrase. — Some way back, I 
used a word which still awaits an application. 
Each phrase, I said, was to be comely; but what 
is a comely phrase? In all ideal and material 
points, literature, being a representative art, 
must look for analogies to painting and the like; 
but in what is technical and executive, being a 
temporal art, it must seek for them in music. 
Each phrase of each sentence, like an air or a 
recitative in music, should be so artfully com- 
pounded out of long and short, out of accented 
and unaccented, as to gratify the sensual ear. 
And of this the ear is the sole judge. It is im- 
possible to lay down laws. Even in our ac- 
centual and rhythmic language no analysis can 
find the secret of the beauty of a verse; how 
much less, then, of those phrases, such as prose 
is built of, which obey no law but to be lawless 
and yet to please? The little that we know of 
verse (and for my part I owe it all to my friend 
Professor Fleeming Jenkin) is, however, par- 
ticularly interesting in the present connection. 
We have been accustomed to describe the heroic 
line as five iambic feet, and to be filled with pain 
and confusion whenever, as by the conscien- 



210 LEARNING TO WRITE 

tious schoolboy, we have heard our own descrip- 
tion put in practice. 

"All night | the dread | less an j gel tin | pur- 
sued/' * 

goes the schoolboy; but though we close our 
ears, we cling to our definition, in spite of its 
proved and naked insufficiency. Mr. Jenkin 
was not so easily pleased, and readily discov- 
ered that the heroic line consists of four groups, 
or, if you prefer the phrase, contains four 
pauses: 

"All night | the dreadless | angel | unpursued." 

Four groups, each practically uttered as one 
word: the first, in this case, an iamb; the second, 
an amphibrachys; the third, a trochee; and the 
fourth, an amphimacer; and yet our schoolboy, 
with no other liberty but that of inflicting pain, 
had triumphantly scanned it as five iambs. 
Perceive, now, this fresh richness of intricacy 
in the web; this fourth orange, hitherto unre- 
marked, but still kept flying with the others. 
What had seemed to be one thing it now ap- 
pears is two; and, like some puzzle in arithmetic, 
the verse is made at the same time to read in 
fives and to read in fours. 

* Milton. 



ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 211 

But again, four is not necessary. We do not, 
indeed, find verses in six groups, because there 
is not room for six in the ten syllables; and we 
do not find verses of two, because one of the 
main distinctions of verse from prose resides 
in the comparative shortness of the group; but 
it is even common to find verses of three. 
Five is the one forbidden number; because five 
is the number of the feet; and if five were 
chosen, the two patterns would coincide, and 
that opposition which is the life of verse would 
instantly be lost. We have here a clue to the 
effect of polysyllables, above all in Latin, where 
they are so common and make so brave an 
architecture in the verse; for the polysyllable is 
a group of Nature's making. If but some 
Roman would return from Hades (Martial, for 
choice), and tell me by what conduct of the 
voice these thundering verses should be uttered 
— "Aut Lacedamonium Tarentum" for a case in 
point — I feel as if I should enter at last into the 
full enjoyment of the best of human verses. 

But, again, the five feet are all iambic, or 
supposed to be; by the mere count of syllables 
the four groups cannot be all iambic; as a ques- 
tion of elegance, I doubt if any one of them re- 
quires to be so; and I am certain that for choice 
no two of them should scan the same. The 
singular beauty of the verse analysed above is 



212 LEARNING TO WRITE 

due, so far as analysis can carry us, part, in- 
deed, to the clever repetition of L, D, and N, 
but part to this variety of scansion in the 
groups. The groups which, like the bar in 
music, break up the verse for utterance, fall 
uniambically; and in declaiming a so-called 
iambic verse, it may so happen that we never 
utter one iambic foot. And yet to this neglect 
of the original beat there is a limit. 



>> * 



"Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts, 

is, with all its eccentricities, a good heroic line; 
for though it scarcely can be said to indicate 
the beat of the iamb, it certainly suggests no 
other measure to the ear. But begin 

"Mother Athens, eye of Greece," 

or merely "Mother Athens," and the game is 
up, for the trochaic beat has been suggested. 
The eccentric scansion of the groups is an 
adornment; but as soon as the original beat has 
been forgotten, they cease implicitly to be ec- 
centric. Variety is what is sought; but if we 
destroy the original mould, one of the terms of 
this variety is lost, and we fall back on same- 
ness. Thus, both as to the arithmetical meas- 
ure of the verse, and the degree of regularity in 

* Milton. 



ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 213 

scansion, we see the laws of prosody to have one 
common purpose: to keep alive the opposition 
of two schemes simultaneously followed; to 
keep them notably apart, though still coinci- 
dent; and to balance them with such judicial 
nicety before the reader, that neither shall be 
unperceived and neither signally prevail. 

The rule of rhythm in prose is not so intricate. 
Here, too, we write in groups, or phrases, as I 
prefer to call them, for the prose phrase is 
greatly longer and is much more nonchalantly 
uttered than the group in verse; so that not 
only is there a greater interval of continuous 
sound between the pauses, but, for that very 
reason, word is linked more readily to word by 
a more summary enunciation. Still, the phrase 
is the strict analogue of the group, and successive 
phrases, like successive groups, must differ 
openly in length and rhythm. The rule of 
scansion in verse is to suggest no measure but 
the one in hand; in prose, to suggest no measure 
at all. Prose must be rhythmical, and it may be 
as much so as you will; but it must not be 
metrical. It may be anything, but it must not 
be verse. A single heroic line may very well 
pass and not disturb the somewhat larger stride 
of the prose style; but one following another 
will produce an instant impression of poverty, 
flatness, and disenchantment. The same lines 



2i 4 LEARNING TO WRITE 

delivered with the measured utterance of verse 
would perhaps seem rich in variety. By the 
more summary enunciation proper to prose, as 
to a more distant vision, these niceties of dif- 
ference are lost. A whole verse is uttered as 
one phrase; and the ear is soon wearied by a 
succession of groups identical in length. The 
prose writer, in fact, since he is allowed to be so 
much less harmonious, is condemned to a per- 
petually fresh variety of movement on a larger 
scale, and must never disappoint the ear by the 
trot of an accepted metre. And this obligation 
is the third orange with which he has to juggle, 
the third quality which the prose writer must 
work into his pattern of words. It may be 
thought perhaps that this is a quality of ease 
rather than a fresh difficulty; but such is the 
inherently rhythmical strain of the English 
language, that the bad writer — and must I take 
for example that admired friend of my boyhood, 
Captain Reid? — the inexperienced writer, as 
Dickens in his earlier attempts to be impressive, 
and the jaded writer, as any one may see for 
himself, all tend to fall at once into the produc- 
tion of bad blank verse. And here it may be 
pertinently asked, Why bad? And I suppose 
it might be enough to answer that no man 
ever made good verse by accident, and that no 
verse can ever sound otherwise than trivial 



ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 215 

when uttered with the delivery of prose. But 
we can go beyond such answers. The weak 
side of verse is the regularity of the beat, which 
in itself is decidedly less impressive than the 
movement of the nobler prose; and it is just 
into this weak side, and this alone, that our 
careless writer falls. A peculiar density and 
mass, consequent on the nearness of the pauses, 
is one of the chief good qualities of verse; but 
this our accidental versifier, still following after 
the swift gait and large gestures of prose, does 
not so much as aspire to imitate. Lastly, since 
he remains unconscious that he is making verse 
at all, it can never occur to him to extract those 
effects of counterpoint and opposition which I 
have referred to as the final grace and justifica- 
tion of verse, and, I may add, of blank verse in 
particular. 

4. Contents of the Phrase. — Here is a great 
deal of talk about rhythm — and naturally; for 
in our canorous language rhythm is always at 
the door. But it must not be forgotten that in 
some languages this element is almost, if not 
quite, extinct, and that in our own it is probably 
decaying. The even speech of many educated 
Americans sounds the note of danger. I should 
see it go with something as bitter as despair, but 
I should not be desperate. As in verse no ele, 
ment, not even rhythm, is necessary, so, in 



216 LEARNING TO WRITE 

prose also, other sorts of beauty will arise and 
take the place and play the part of those that 
we outlive. The beauty of the expected beat in 
verse, the beauty in prose of its larger and more 
lawless melody, patent as they are to English 
hearing, are already silent in the ears of our 
next neighbours; for in France the oratorical 
accent and the pattern of the web have almost 
or altogether succeeded to their places; and the 
French prose writer would be astounded at the 
labours of his brother across the Channel, and 
how a good quarter of his toil, above all invito, 
Minerva, is to avoid writing verse. So wonder- 
fully far apart have races wandered in spirit, 
and so hard it is to understand the literature 
next door ! 

Yet French prose is distinctly better than 
English; and French verse, above all while Hugo 
lives, it will not do to place upon one side. 
What is more to our purpose, a phrase or a 
verse in French is easily distinguishable as 
comely or uncomely. There is then another 
element of comeliness hitherto overlooked in 
this analysis: the contents of the phrase. Each 
phrase in literature is built of sounds, as each 
phrase in music consists of notes. One sound 
suggests, echoes, demands, and harmonises with 
another; and the art of rightly using these con- 
cordances is the final art in literature. It used 
to be a piece of good advice to all young writers 



ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 217 

to avoid alliteration; and the advice was sound, 
in so far as it prevented daubing. None the 
less for that, was it abominable nonsense, and 
the mere raving of those blindest of the blind 
who will not see. The beauty of the contents of 
a phrase, or of a sentence, depends implicitly 
upon alliteration and upon assonance. The 
vowel demands to be repeated; the consonant 
demands to be repeated; and both cry aloud 
to be perpetually varied. You may follow the 
adventures of a letter through any passage that 
has particularly pleased you; find it, perhaps, 
denied awhile, to tantalise the ear; find it fired 
again at you in a whole broadside; or find it 
pass into congenerous sounds, one liquid or 
labial melting away into another. And you 
will find another and much stranger circum- 
stance. Literature is written by and for two 
senses: a sort of internal ear, quick to per- 
ceive " unheard melodies"; and the eye, which 
directs the pen and deciphers the printed phrase. 
Well, even as there are rhymes for the eye, so 
you will find that there are assonances and 
alliterations; that where an author is running 
the open A, deceived by the eye and our strange 
English spelling, he will often show a tender- 
ness for the flat A; and that where he is running 
a particular consonant, he will not improbably 
rejoice to write it down even when it is mute or 
bears a different value. 



218 LEARNING TO WRITE 

Here, then, we have a fresh pattern — a pat- 
tern, to speak grossly, of letters — which makes 
the fourth preoccupation of the prose writer, 
and the fifth of the versifier. At times it is very 
delicate and hard to perceive, and then perhaps 
most excellent and winning (I say perhaps); 
but at times again the elements of this literal 
melody stand more boldly forward and usurp 
the ear. It becomes, therefore, somewhat a 
matter of conscience to select examples; and as 
I cannot very well ask the reader to help me, I 
shall do the next best by giving him the reason 
or the history of each selection. The two first, 
one in prose, one in verse, I chose without 
previous analysis, simply as engaging passages 
that had long re-echoed in my ear. 

"I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered vir- 
tue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never 
sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks 
out of the race where that immortal garland is 
to be run for, not without dust and heat." * 
Down to "virtue," the current S and R are 
both announced and repeated unobtrusively, 
and by way of a grace-note that almost insepa- 
rable group PVF is given entire, f The next 

* Milton. 

t As PVF will continue to haunt us through our English 
examples, take, by way of comparison, this Latin verse, of 
which it forms a chief adornment, and do not hold me an- 
swerable for the all too Roman freedom of the sense: "Hanc 
volo, quae facilis, quae palliolata vagatur." 



ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 219 

phrase is a period of repose, almost ugly in it- 
self, both S and R still audible, and B given as 
the last fulfilment of PVF. In the next four 
phrases, from "that never" down to "run for," 
the mask is thrown off, and, but for a slight 
repetition of the F and V, the whole matter 
turns, almost too obtrusively, on S and R; 
first S coming to the front, and then R. In 
the concluding phrase all these favourite let- 
ters, and even the flat A, a timid preference for 
which is just perceptible, are discarded at a 
blow and in a bundle; and to make the break 
more obvious, every word ends with a dental, 
and all but one with T, for which we have been 
cautiously prepared since the beginning. The 
singular dignity of the first clause, and this 
hammer-stroke of the last, go far to make the 
charm of this exquisite sentence. But it is fair 
to own that S and R are used a little coarsely. 

"In Xanadv did Kubla Khan (KANDL) 
A stately pleasure dome decree, (KDLSR) 

Where Alph the sacred river ran, (KANDLSR) 

Through caverns measureless to 

man, (KANLSR) 

Down to a sunless sea." * (NDLS) 

Here I have put the analysis of the main 
group alongside the lines; and the more it is 
looked at, the more interesting it will seem. 
But there are further niceties. In lines two 

* Coleridge. 



220 LEARNING TO WRITE 

and four, the current S is most delicately varied 
with Z. In line three, the current flat A is 
twice varied with the open A, already suggested 
in line two, and both times (" where" and 
"sacred") in conjunction with the current R. 
In the same line F and V (a harmony in them- 
selves, even when shorn of their comrade P) 
are admirably contrasted. And in line four 
there is a marked subsidiary M, which again 
was announced in line two. I stop from weari- 
ness, for more might yet be said. 

My next example was recently quoted from 
Shakespeare as an example of the poet's colour 
sense. Now, I do not think literature has any- 
thing to do with colour, or poets anyway the 
better of such a sense; and I instantly attacked 
this passage, since "purple" was the word that 
had so pleased the writer of the article, to see 
if there might not be some literary reason for 
its use. It will be seen that I succeeded amply; 
and I am bound to say I think the passage ex- 
ceptional in Shakespeare — exceptional, indeed, 
in literature; but it was not I who chose it. 

"The BaRge she sat iN, like a BURNished 

throNe 
BURNt oN the water: the POOP was BeateN 

gold, 
PURPle the sails and so PUR* FumM that 
The wiNds were love-sick with them." 1 

* per * Antony and Cleopatra. 



ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 221 

It may be asked why I have put the F of "per- 
fumed" in capitals; and I reply, because this 
change from P to F is the completion of that 
from B to P, already so adroitly carried out. 
Indeed, the whole passage is a monument of 
curious ingenuity; and it seems scarce worth 
while to indicate the subsidiary S, L, and W. 
In the same article, a second passage from 
Shakespeare was quoted, once again as an ex- 
ample of his colour sense: 

"A mole cinque-spotted like the crimson drops 
F the bottom of a cowslip." * 

It is very curious, very artificial, and not 
worth while to analyse at length: I leave it to 
the reader. But before I turn my back on 
Shakespeare, I should like to quote a passage, 
for my own pleasure, and for a very model of 
every technical art: 

"But in the wind and tempest of her frown, 

W.P.V.fF. (st)(ow) 
Distinction with a loud and powerful fan, 

W.RF. (st)(ow)L 
Puffing at all, winnows the light away; 

W. P. F. L 
And what hath mass and matter by itself 

W.F.L.M.A. 
Lies rich in virtue and unmingled."t 

V. L. M. 

* Cymbeline. \ The V is in "of." % Troilus and Cressida. 



222 LEARNING TO WRITE 

From these delicate and choice writers I 
turned with some curiosity to a player of the 
big drum — Macaulay. I had in hand the two- 
volume edition, and I opened at the beginning 
of the second volume. Here was what I read: 

"The violence of revolutions is generally pro- 
portioned to the degree of the maladministration 
which has produced them. It is therefore not 
strange that the government of Scotland, having 
been during many years greatly more corrupt 
than the government of England, should have 
fallen with a far heavier ruin. The movement 
against the last king of the house of Stuart was 
in England conservative, in Scotland destruc- 
tive. The English complained not of the law, 
but of the violation of the law." 

This was plain-sailing enough; it was our old 
friend PVF, floated by the liquids in a body; 
but as I read on, and turned the page, and still 
found PVF with his attendant liquids, I confess 
my mind misgave me utterly. This could be 
no trick of Macaulay's; it must be the nature 
of the English tongue. In a kind of despair, I 
turned half-way through the volume; and com- 
ing upon his lordship dealing with General 
Cannon, and fresh from Claverhouse and Kil- 
liecrankie, here, with elucidative spelling, was 
my reward: 

"Meanwhile the disorders of Kannon's Kamp 
went on inKreasing. He Kalled a Kouncil of 



ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 223 

war to Konsider what Kourse it would be advis- 
able to taKe. But as soon as the Kouncil had 
met, a preliminary Kuestion was raised. The 
army was almost eKsKlusively a Highland 
army. The recent viKtory had been won 
eKsKlusively by Highland warriors. Great 
chie/s who had brought siKs or Se^en hundred 
/ighting men into the/ield did not think it /air 
that they should be outvoted by gentlemen /rom 
Ireland, and /rom the Low Kountries, who bore 
indeed King James's Kommission, and were 
Kalled Kolonels and Kap tains, but who were 
Kolonels without regiments and Kaptains with- 
out Kompanies." 

A moment of FV in all this world of K's ! It 
was not the English language, then, that was 
an instrument of one string, but Macaulay that 
was an incomparable dauber. 

It was probably from this barbaric love of 
repeating the same sound, rather than from any 
design of clearness, that he acquired his irritat- 
ing habit of repeating words; I say the one 
rather than the other, because such a trick of 
the ear is deeper-seated and more original in 
man than any logical consideration. Few 
writers, indeed, are probably conscious of the 
length to which they push this melody of let- 
ters. One, writing very diligently, and only 
concerned about the meaning of his words and 
the rhythm of his phrases, was struck into 
amazement by the eager triumph with which he 



224 LEARNING TO WRITE 

cancelled one expression to substitute another. 
Neither changed the sense; both being mono- 
syllables, neither could affect the scansion; and 
it was only by looking back on what he had al- 
ready written that the mystery was solved: 
the second word contained an open A, and for 
nearly half a page he had been riding that vowel 
to the death. 

In practice, I should add, the ear is not always 
so exacting; and ordinary writers, in ordinary 
moments, content themselves with avoiding 
what is harsh, and here and there, upon a rare 
occasion, buttressing a phrase, or linking two 
together, with a Jmtch of assonance or a mo- 
mentary jingle of alliteration. To understand 
how constant is this preoccupation of good 
writers, even where its results are least obtru- 
sive, it is only necessary to turn to the bad. 
There, indeed, you will find cacophony supreme, 
the rattle of incongruous consonants only re- 
lieved by the jaw-breaking hiatus, and whole 
phrases not to be articulated by the powers of 
man. 

Conclusion. — We may now briefly enumerate 
the elements of style. We have, peculiar to the 
prose writer, the task of keeping his phrases 
large, rhythmical, and pleasing to the ear, 
without ever allowing them to fall into the 
strictly metrical: peculiar to the versifier, the 
task of combining and contrasting his double, 



ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 225 

treble, and quadruple pattern, feet and groups, 
logic and metre — harmonious in diversity: com- 
mon to both, the task of artfully combining the 
prime elements of language into phrases that 
shall be musical in the mouth; the task of 
weaving their argument into a texture of com- 
mitted phrases and of rounded periods — but 
this particularly binding in the case of prose: 
and, again common to both, the task of choos- 
ing apt, explicit, and communicative words. 
We begin to see now what an intricate affair 
is any perfect passage; how many faculties, 
whether of taste or pure reason, must be held 
upon the stretch to make it; and why, when it 
is made, it should afford us so complete a pleas- 
ure. From the arrangement of according let- 
ters, which is altogether arabesque and sensual, 
up to the architecture of the elegant and preg- 
nant sentence, which is a vigorous act of the 
pure intellect, there is scarce a faculty in man 
but has been exercised. We need not wonder, 
then, if perfect sentences are rare, and perfect 
pages rarer. 



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